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For DeviantArt specifically, you had an environment where a sizable portion of site monetization came through sales of merch derived from uploaded content or subscriptions to access gated content, along with a discovery algorithm that largely favored the firehose view as much or more than word of mouth. This had its problems even before AI hit, both the obvious (commissions are much more favorable for newer artists and were badly supported), and the more subtle (minimum and maximum prices made more compliance sense than business sense), but AI gen drew the more serious contradictions to the fore.
With Stable Diffusion, it was possible to just flood thousands of images a week, covering a variety of different common tags, per account, and spammers could make a lot of accounts. Only a couple results would ever break out, and maybe a handful would make any sales period, but that's all it really took for some scammers to find it worthwhile. Contrary to popular belief, I don't think that a majority of submissions were AIgen, even at the height of the initial rush, but a large enough portion were that the firehose view was pretty regularly blasted with repeated pages of AIgen. Worse, there was a lot of suspicion that works not tagged as AI were AI, and the more paranoid were sure >25% were AIgen.
DeviantArt had anti-flooding rules, but were slow to bring enforcement against anything but the clearest spammer. Presumably this had some impact on how much payout the scammers could get, and maybe discouraged some of them, but it left the enforcement invisible and didn't solve the firehose interference problem.
I think the death of the platform is overstated, but it's definitely not favored in the way it was at the start of the COVID era. Some of that's downstream of other related issues: DeviantArt integrated an AIgen capability called DreamUp, and while there's probably some way they could have sold it without optimizing for pissing off anti-AI artists (such as helping fit creator artwork to specific merch categories, having automatic eligibility disabled). They definitely didn't, so now it's mostly known as a way that DeviantArt has promoted some really slop-focused artists like Isaris-AI (not linking because it stretches the definition of 'bikini', >15 submissions/day) or mikonotai (cw: tits in not very convincing armor, >7 submissions/day).
I don't have much idea of what happened at Literotica.
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