As someone who doesn't do much more than "download and install and use this stuff" (and donate, because I don't contribute anything else), I couldn't disagree more. Everything is much more centralized and organized nowadays, and the Knossos launcher is way easier to use for someone who hasn't been tweaking FS for a long time.
Pay sites? Sure, there were a few years where it was near impossible to find a CD copy of FS2, and digital distribution hadn't taken off yet, but HLP has been recommending GOG for getting the base game for quite some time now, that's nothing new (ten years or so at least).
If you don't like Knossos, just think of it as a repository. Anytime you see those Knossos links, you can manually download the files instead of using the Knossos installer/mod manager. If you want to use an older launcher or tweak your mods the old-fashioned way, that's how you get all the files nowadays with the caveat that you can't really expect to get any kind of official support for mods, because you're not doing it the approved way. If you know how to mod and debug mods yourself, nothing has really changed.