Sort of posted this elsewhere, but I think Craigslist is suffering from this as well. It seems to be losing market share from what I can tell. I showed up on their site for the first time about a year ago to buy and sell furniture, and was so turned off by it. Ended up using a different platform.
Visual appeal is extremely powerful, and it's valuable to virtually any product.
If it is suffering from anything, I'd suggest Craigslist is suffering more from the number of scam/spam/low-effort posts ("Honda for sale." No model, mileage, photos, etc in the post) that you have to sort through or the tricks you have to use to avoid them.
ex: When searching for an apartment, I always have to put a price floor in place because everything more than ~25% below market is pure spam and there's a ton of it. It wouldn't occur to the average person that they could filter a bunch of spam out by putting a lower limit on the price of the thing they're looking for, for example. So they get an even worse experience than me, and it's pretty painful to sort through even with various tricks like that in the filtering.
Visual appeal is extremely powerful, and it's valuable to virtually any product.