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Then I come to some tiny imageboard, and everyone's still arguing about the same things they always are, as if nothing in the world has changed.

Yes but there's a massive lack of creativity in these environments. It's still better than the big drama of the moment, but at its core is just another flavor of indolent chitchat. What we're doing right now is chitchat and it will surely go nowhere because nobody wants to follow through on anything.
I think the internet of some time ago was more intent on creating things, it was oriented toward "projects", hey let's make a zine, hey let's do this thing, let's both make things, let's show each other what we made. There was more enthusiasm even for mediocre things. Now you could take serious time to do something with genuine effort and love and you'd be lucky if anybody notices. But if you talk about the drama or show them something titillating you get instant engagement. It feels sometimes like people have their brains shut off and only react to these low level stimuli. Maybe this is a response to oversaturation but how can you expect people to get away from it? I am still overwhelmed and as far as the internet goes I'm like a hermit.

Maybe someone could make a board with a rule that says you can only post if you haven't visited any larger forum in X days.

The problem with this is that people will just lie or as you said find ways to circumvent any hardcoded fix. The biggest filter that IRL gives you is that lies don't work that well in the real world. If someone says he's rich, but he's actually poor, he can fake being rich for a little bit but eventually it won't work. If someone says he's against internet overconsumption but spends day and night hunched over a phone you can tell he's bullshitting. But online you can keep lies going virtually indefinitely and people seem to be very happy with this. We're going through the general rejection of authenticity as a virtue which is I think unprecedented in human culture.

I especially like the idea of a forum that cares about individual people, rather than just treating everyone as transient, alienated, fungible ip addresses. Maybe when someone signed up, they would be assigned a mentor, who would check up on them, to see how they're doing. Idk.

You're really looking at personal messaging. I was thinking about getting a penpal lately, something like language exchange.
Also being anonymous for so long has made me more cowardly, so I'm part of the problem.