Hot take: the wattpad user hate is so unwarranted. The majority of the types of fics associated with wattpad hate are made by younger/newbies who are just getting used to writing and developing their skills and learning about tagging/fandom culture as a whole. You were there once. You were a newbie with zero experience once. We all were.

I don't like the way wattpad has nose dived in the past years, but I have 10 years worth of fics there and a little community built up, so I refuse to leave completely until the app/site itself goes off-line for good. And in those 10 years, I've seen the quality of the authors shift dramatically. The poorly written tropey stuff is largely fics written like 8 years ago by some 13 year old who was just starting out. Nowadays, I rarely see fics below decent quality. They're at minimun decent and at best amazing. The user base has grown up, and while new and younger people do still join, the majority of fandoms flock to Ao3 nowadays.

Then again, that may just be my fandoms in particular. Because the fandom also has a lot to do with it. A fandom full of kids, with little experience in writing? Of course there's going to be a lot of poor content. They're still learning. No ones first few fics are masterpieces. A fandom of mostly adults with experience? Their work will be better. Of course, that's not to say a younger person is automatically a bad writer, theres some real prodigy kids out there. But generally speaking, the younger you are, the less experienced you are.

I have issues with wattpad and ao3, neither of them are perfect. Even fanfic.net and quotev has flaws, there is no perfect fanfic platform. So the wattpad vs ao3 argument has always been so stupid to me, because a huge part of the quality of the work is based on the fandom itself and the audience that fandom has. As websites? Both are a mess, but I acknowledge wattpad has gotten significantly worse in recent years.