You have some serious rose colored glasses on. 2010 google was insanely easy to manipulate. It was like golden era for grey/blackhat SEO. It didn't even start to get moderately difficult until like 2014-2015. Google of today is significantly less spam infested.
Source: I've been doing digital marketing/SEO since ~2008 and happily abused easy signals to manipulate rankings for fun and profit for many of those early years.
Source: I've been doing digital marketing/SEO since ~2008 and happily abused easy signals to manipulate rankings for fun and profit for many of those early years.