they are a BLIGHT upon good imageboards. They started off as a way to contain traffic - specifically, for 4/v/ to contain all the league of ass faggots threads that were cluttering up v. This site isn't anywhere near fast enough right now to require them to follow individual discussions, we can post a thread and come back to it days later just fine.
Unfortunately though, generals have morphed into something far far worse. They now exist (especially on /pol/ boards) as this weird little community-within-a-community, a splintered off walled garden for people who don't fit in with the rest of the board's culture and would otherwise get bullied for it until they learned to fit in- it's like an airlock designed to keep the rest of the site out and their little in-group fully self contained. They have their own memes, their own namefags, their own culture, none of which leaves their faggy little chatrooms disguised as threads. This is a serious issue, because the ability for a community to police its own culture is vital to it having a defined culture at all. If these newfags are spread evenly across the website they all will be forced to assimilate as they interact with the locals, but if they all immigrate into the same neighborhood all at once they're not going to bother learning the local language or how to take the poo to the loo, they'll turn the neighborhood into a racial ghetto no-go-zone where nobody speaks english and everybody shits on the streets like it's normal - they'll bring their culture here and force us to adapt to them while acting smug about it.
The people who frequent general threads don't fit in with imageboard culture, don't *try* to fit in, and generally are insufferable redditfags and qboomers who are dumb, boring, and cringey. There are faggots right now in ptg saying "awoo" unironically. If this isn't physically painful to you I really don't know what to say.
Please mr admins, do the needful to make imageboards great again