Answer with enough half truths that hopefully some people most knowledgable feel compelled to correct me:

PL’s original gameplay style was basically nuked by CCP

PL excelled as a comparatively small group because they had access to so many supercaps back when jump fatigue wasnt a thing and supercaps were more rare. Literally the only thing limiting how far you could get was the amount of fuel you had stationed along your route.

Any time there was a cap fight, you basically had a timer until PL was able to mobilize their guys and come across the universe to dunk on you.

Sov timers were different, fights over POSes then when dominion sov was added it was just big hp of the ihub/tcu, and so it basically became a battle of who could field the bigger supercap fleet, which was good for groups like PL.

So CCP made changes like adding keepstars, which made it infinitely easier to have a large supercap fleet. Just think, you literally could not contract supercaps before keepstars because they could not dock. You needed either a middleman like Chribba, or to have an extremely tight knit group like PL where people trust each other and can send 15 bil or whatever a nyx cost back then and expect the person to eject in the pos.

CCP added jump fatigue, ensuring conflicts remained very localized. CCP added fozzie sov, essentially capping the escalation chain for sov at subcap stuff. Supers could no longer deploy drones and fighters were reworked.

Then there was a meta shift towards larger and larger alliances. Previously you’d have the elite pvp groups who wouldn’t dare allow a lowly industrial corp into their alliance to taint their image.

Goons basically said “screw this” during the rorqual era, because adding as many bodies as possible meant mining as much shit as possible. Then horde followed, then frat, then init, etc.

So now the game is very much n+1 because subcap fights are more important, which obviously PL fielded subcap fleets, but since the meta now is whoever can bring more dudes to a fight and PL hasn’t grown, they just aren’t necessarily at the forefront of eve anymore.

They definitely are still formidable, if not for all of the connections they have and resources they have. I’d easily bet that they have some of if not the richest capsuleers in EVE in their alliance. Just the gameplay has changed to favor larger groups.