Not a troll question, a genuine question:
Do you have a reference? This is pretty new to me 
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Discourse has taken a pretty strong “signatures don’t belong in core” since its foundation, see for example this post from 2013.
Now of course, the beauty of the software is that it’s fully customizable, so if you really want signatures, there is an official plugin for it
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Yes. You only have to click on an avatar to get more User information and don’t have to suffer scrolling and scrolling lots of information irrelevant to the current Topic.
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Signatures are definitely a relic of the past. The rise of mobile makes screen real estate a lot more value so it’s unwieldy to let people arbitrarily fill up most of the space with junk.
However, what’s lost when signatures are gone is the ability to express yourself or your personality outside of your avatar and username.
So on my forum we tried to strike a balance by allowing users to choose from a set of small predetermined spirites. It minimizes space used while still giving people another way to express themselves.
Gone are open-ended signatures but we don’t have to throw out the full baby with the bathwater.
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Might make me old. 
But signatures have been. Used since the days of dial up ANSI/ASCII graphics BBSes most ran in DOS but there was also C=64 and Amiga Running BBSes.
Depending on the Bulletin Board people might use an Offline Mail reader .
A lot of BBS software was a hack/fork of Telegard. The most commonly used one was “Renegade BBS”
https://renegade.sourceforge.net/index.html
Back in those days I got into Hex editing the OVR file inserting MCI codes to further customize the interface.
With an auto signature &/or a tagline.
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But do you remember too how siganatures stopped to be fun after one passes teenages and those were just annoying because repetition after repetition. Like hearing same ancient joke dozen time a day 
And then came companies and posts were more ads than content. Actually I would say signatures were like pre-historical google ads.
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It really depended on how big the signature was.
Taglines was a 1 liner
Where I was back then a signature was typically at most 4 lines that formed an ASCII pic.
But agreed some ppl would at times create ridiculously huge ones.
I do recall many pcgamung forums and similar usually had their PC setup posted(basics cpu/ram/GPU & maybe Hard drive)
As some have recently requested an option to be able to restrict signatures to certain groups does make sense to keep things more reasonable.
A company I volunteer admin for. The signature is used to display a couple support links & such. So nothing too crazy. The company I volunteer for is quite decent with not flooding adds in their forum. However they are still working in their support process as it is not consistent user XP.
A lot comes down to cultural norms & community maturity ,group(s) level of maturity. Both are subjective as it will vary from one culture to another. Ie the folks looking to make posts empty if content. While I understand the request’s purpose is more of a cultural thing. It is not something I myself would use.
However sometimes I do just want to create a post with quoted content for a discussion topic that is kept cleaner by only having announcement posts. Having to enter 20 chars can be quite annoying (yes I know I can lower this default). 
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Yes, that’s still a common thing (at least in the forums I visit). And in a way it’s nice to sometimes have a look at what other people are using. But then the question is: how often do I really consciously look at that? And for me, that’s definitely rare.
So I feel Discourse has made the right call to go with a more minimalist post layout and push user text (as well as most statistics) to the user profile/info card.
That being said: if we do really move the forum where I’m an admin to Discourse, I’m pretty sure some people will miss them, at least initially, if only because they have been around for so long.
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Maybe it is possible to change the signatures to VIP user exclusive?
The core benefit I see with a gaming community having a system specs in the “Signature” can be beneficial for ppl with support questions. I know with admining a couple of VR Communities when a person is having problems with a game/device. Quite often need to request them to post these details.
That being said you can install signatures and keep it pretty clean with Hide Details. Or even add a toggle say in the sidebar, header to turn on/off visibility. Or something completely different. Like a computer icon in posts near the poster’s avatar that can be clicked to pull up a pop up window. The flexibility is very wide for what you can do
Though if using the solved plugin with one of the various template options you can have these queries in a help topic for example.
Now having signatures have more options added at some point like group & category control options would be very welcome.
With Discourse you can have simple minimal to crazy complex with just about every feature one could think a forum could have.
Something truly archiac though imho is the string threads that Reddit uses to connect comments. I am not fond of. That has been around since Dial up BBS.
Discourse has added a much better feature with being able to focus on a comment where it hides the rest of the topic posts except those tied to a specific post.
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And then it would give light version of info that can be told using avatar. I don’t get the point of it or similar solutions.
And yet it is practically extinct
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That can be really annoying when people have a weird quote or saying in a signature that is more lines of text than most of the posts they write is especially bad.
Seems reasonable to have a one line signature option with the official plug-in can be good if people are writing many paragraph long posts can start to loose track of who the author is if there isn’t a signature at the end.
While the profile picture at the top left travels down with post and clicking that to link to user profile kind of acts like signature, that can also be annoying.
Perhaps good feature request would be to have link to user profile posted at the end of posts, suppose that can be done with the signature option somehow? That could be done manually by users, but may be better for it to be automatic that all signatures are just a link to the user card so there isn’t risk of people writing in confusing parables in that.
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I could live with oneliners, if system would force to use several ones, that would come randomly.
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Unlike a signature a user would have to choose to open the icon. In tech & gaming support this saves time asking a member to post the info. Now if you’re not into gaming or tech peripherals then yes it would be if no value to you.
String threads? Unfortunately no.
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Yep that is generally how the taglines worked. Random ones in a collection.
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Oh yes! I remember people replying with one sentence and their signatures being several lines. That made for an excess amount of scrolling. I didn’t care for that at all - early to mid-90’s. No wonder I have grey hair. 
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where I was ppl kept them reasonable around 3 lines tall. Granted on 640x480 didn’t take much to have to scroll. Lol
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