I'm not sure whether they've loosened Google's "Death Grip," as much as they've separated garbage content from good content so the algo doesn't have to blacklist their entire site.
Although I wonder: if a website spreads enough of its "garbage" around multiple domains (not subdomains), it might be able to still avoid the new blacklist threshold while polluting entire pages of Google results. It's not hard to trivially reskin your site and pump it through hundreds of domains--certain sites in, ahem, seedier parts of the web have done it for years.