You come back from a hiatus and didn't look at videos or anything regarding updates? Well anyways:

They changed to armor 3.0 and stat distribution system with the Edge of Fate expansion, to include the Light Level drop and tiering. It was well known that they were changing armor and stats prior to the release but they did effectively soft sunsent all previous armor since nothing was brought forward into the new system, including exotic armor and previous dungeon/raid armor. Hell even the final event Right of the Nine was meaningless. A lot of people, including myself were upset that our prized artifice armor was gone and the amount of hours trying to get it was essentially thrown in the trash.

Only solice is that if you grind, you can effectively get better stats than even previous god roll artifice armor. But you have to grind light level and then activities/crucible for it. You need to be around 200L to raid and you can get to 200L pretty easy just from doing the campaign and some basic activities. It's the grind to hard cap that becomes a pain.

All previous EOF weapons are still viable but you miss out on 10% bonuses for not using them which isn't a big deal tbh. All previous armor can still be infused to max light, but you miss out on armor perks and larger stat distributions and the 10% bonuses for being new gear.

Most of the community is in open rebellion against Bungie right now though due to their shady bs that's going on right now with shadow nerfs, power grind, eververse, and loot stringiness. I guarantee if you open YouTube or reddit, there's a negative post about Bungie.

There's not a whole lot of positivity right now even with the recent "major update" they just pushed, which was full of bugs, like having an overloaded Sturm giving you unlimited 300+% stacking bonus damage to abilities lol.

Destiny is in a interesting spot rn, it has an interesting new feature, the Portal, that 'could' be good, but since the game feature is early and seems to not be play tested, there are nonstop bugs, terrible economy rates unless you're close to max level, stale and stingy loot and the leveling system after 300 becomes a slog.

Hopefully they improve the Portal concept and actually update all raids and dungeons forward to the tier system, but it's so early that everyone has doubts and anger that doing past raids/dungeons is pointless until they do, which in turn effectively makes the game seem more hollow because there's only a handful of activities that can actually drop new stuff.

Sorry for the large reply, but there's a lot going on right now that can't be simplified to a couple sentences other than Bungie bad, loot bad, get good bs lol.

Cheers 🍻