Yea, that 1st picture just screams z height adjustment. The 1st layer has to squish between the bed and nozzle to adhere properly, otherwise its just printing thin strings of spaghetti into thin air.

However the tapering isn't totally explained by this as it seems you may not be getting bed adhesion this would only affect the first few layers. Unless there was a huge amount of filament getting pulled around by the print head that didn't get included in the print itself.

I'm using the Ender3 also - how much do you enjoy the glass bed upgrade? I'm torn between upgrading the FW and BLtouch sensor to get mesh bed leveling or simply just get a glass bed.