The only reason people "liked" Kuz was that the site wasn't as much of a namefag Discord shithole while he was running it. It was not perfect by any means, 'p spam was relatively common, and his mostly hands-off approach had problems... but back then attention whores were bullied/doxxed off the site and you didn't have 500+ reply threads filled with retards like Joel falling for bait. Also OC was actively being produced.
It was more like the wild west I guess. Kuz didn't really do all that much to shape the site's future.