It's been years since I've posted at WebmasterWorld.

Background:

I sold a site in 2010 to what was then Internet Brands. I kept another site that I continued to work on for the next ten years and it has, by and large, been ok income productive. However, it has taken repeated hits from google updates the last couple of years. As of September 2019, the site has been in freefall and I can't figure out what's wrong. This dive has occurred concurrent with changes I made to the site, as well as issues involving my hosting service that actually got me booted from Bing, Yahoo, and Duckduckgo (now back in). Those SEs don't matter much, of course, in terms of traffic but it is still annoying that I rank on page one above the fold for my main keywords on those engines, and am barely visible on google.

Bringing us up to now:

My traffic and earnings have dived further with the onset of covid-19 since many of my potential users are probably not doing the activity that takes them to a site like mine. I was like meh, I'll wait it out.

Lo and behold, I get approached with an offer to buy the site. The offer is 3x last year's earnings, which is too low; however, I am tempted b/c I am now sort of sick of everything (been doing this since 2003 and made enough to pay off a house, wipe out all debt, and fund my retirement portofolio with the sale of my other site in 2010 mainly).

Now, the acquistion guy for the company that approached me sees value in my site, says the traffic was good until 9/2019, and says his team is good at rebounding traffic on otherwise good sites. But...he also said this: "I do not expect even my team will be able to rebound to those prior traffic levels without serious investment (5 figures a month) in link building, and we just need to play that out after we can start making our tweaks."

True, years ago I spent considerable time and effort in link development, and don't do it now. But my site has several thousand good previously acquired links, some from .gov sources. And...a prominent authority told me that I have enough links and not to worry about getting more. Rather, to focus on content.

Questions:

1. Am I to believe that someone pouring buckets of cash into gettting links will fix this site?
2. IMO, spending 5 figures monthly means using guys in India to do link development because legit link building is labor intensive and so India is the place.
3. Is this guy trying to scare me into thinking the only way to save the site is to spend oodles of cash, which they are willing to do?
4. I thought big link building campaigns were passe and too risky because newly appearing links tripped wires with Google.
5. I once knew of someone who does this type of expensive link building but they are out of that biz. Suggestions?
6. Lastly, any ideas or insights about this situation? I am teetering between wanting to sell this site and wanting to find a way to improve it and hold on to it. What I don't want to do is spend more years beating my head against a wall.

Thanks for any input.