Exchanges just use heavy KYC as a pathetic excuse to delay withdrawals and disable your account if they just decide you have be their monkey today and eat shit while filming it all to fulfil their KYC requirements.
The scammy ones do that, but legitimate exchanges like Coinbase, Binance, and others are required to get KYC docs from their customers since they're regulated by the governments of the countries they operate in. It's not that exchanges have started to require KYC for shady purposes, it's that cryptocurrency has attracted the attention of government agencies over the past few years--and as far as I can tell it's not going to get any better.
If you're trying to buy crypto with fiat, forget about it. I think pretty much all the exchanges that deal in fiat are going to require a scan of your photo ID, a selfie, and all of that. If you're looking to just trade bitcoin<-->altcoins, then you've got more options, like Kucoin, SouthXchange, and even Yobit (though I wouldn't recommend them).
We're almost out of the wild west days of unregulated crypto exchanges, man. Things definitely were different in 2015, but there's no going back in time and regulations aren't likely to become more lax.