My old boss in Austin told me to just buy links from Fiverr, but after my site got flagged, I had to rebuild from scratch. | Backlink Building - Opinions Matter
That Austin advice is a classic shortcut to a penalty. Flagged sites usually just need a disavow file and a lot of clean content. Starting over was probably overkill.
Yeah, starting over sounds rough. Did you try the disavow tool before you rebuilt everything? Sometimes you can fix a flagged site if you cut out the bad links and wait a few months.