Sudden Signal Loss Fixed With Old Splitter, But Why?

Just to preface this, I am not a network engineer but have used/worked with computers basically all my life in some capacity and am learning more about this side of things as I go since Cox is unsurprisingly very unhelpful when it comes to troubleshooting remotely. 

The drop line from Cox was going straight to a barrel on the side of the house and in through the floor to my modem/router, no splitter involved. Last night, I suddenly lost signal, the C7800 Nighthawk I use was showing something like -42dbmv on ch1 Bonded Downstream and that was the only channel that would lock, no other Up or Downstream channels were locking. Tried a different, basically new barrel and the signal got slightly stronger but still nothing (I think it was around -18). Then, we tried an old splitter that was still attached to the side of the house, likely quite old, and it resolved the issue completely.

Now, my research points to the underlying cause being the drop going bad, and the splitter merely mitigated the issue by resolving an impedance mismatch or providing a more stable connection between the damaged drop and the interior cables or some combination thereof. Does this sound correct? Looking for experienced folks thoughts. 

We did not see any moisture in the connections at the barrel, there are boots on the F connectors. One interesting thing of note was that the F connector on the drop cable was hot to the touch when I went outside to check it out initially. It does appear that someone in the past spliced a new connector onto the old drop at some point too, which makes me think that there were already issues with it in the past and they are just doing everything they can to avoid replacing the whole drop but I would love to be corrected.