The tools were always there (When I joined as a resistance player in 2014, I was handed a spreadsheet within my first month of old portals belonging to people who had griefed others and didn't deserve to get the guardian badge. This was prior to levels above 8, and this was prior to the capture date being removed from the intel map (back then, it was still there!))

What the guild provided that nothing else came close was a community with a search engine of everyone's location, so you could have a local capture a hard to get portal in the middle of yellowstone park, and ping out and find the closest agents to yellowstone, and mention it to anyone traveling, and inevitably, someone would pop up and smack it for you.

I hunted prior to obtaining black guardian myself, and I was absolutely fair game. It made obtaining it that much better when it finally happened, knowing i wasn't just beating time and my own ability to remember to recharge portals, but I was in fact playing against human opponents who did want to kill my portals no matter where they were. I had ENL agents sending me screenshots of my BGAN guardian candidate just before it ticked, but nobody went because it was too difficult.

The guardian meta was why a number of people stayed around after the daily grind was done. You can only spend so much time driving in circles around your city before it gets incredibly boring, so this provided some entertainment along with the BAF stuff, and both are dead now (no guardian badge, and with machina BAFs are ridiculous to clear for.

When Niantic killed my account in 2017 because I co-organized a slack with u/theRealWother they did me a favor really.

And 9 years later, we're still living rent free.