It’s going back to actual story telling instead of trying to just insert as many jokes as possible.

In the bad seasons, you’d have so many plotlines that just didn’t make sense and characters doing things they simply wouldn’t do. For example, Marge is not the absent minded idiot that Homer is, but if the joke needs her to be, then that’s exactly what she’d be turned into, without any explanation. They do the same with the overall plot too