Based on two of your comments you guys in the UK must be getting your google feeds straight from hell. I just now searched for mary jane. seen 50-100 results in a manner of seconds and not 1 from pinterest or instagram. Maybe I'm an idiot and using the wrong search term to stake my claim. Out of an image search for "scary makeup looks" the first 100 results have about 7 pinterest or instagram results. Tongue-in-cheek search of "heroin chic" returns 100 results + and only 1 instagram result.
I may have been exaggerating a bit, but the overall impression absolutely is that google search and google image search especially is nowhere near as good as it used to be.
Both are now massively limited, shrunken, curtailed, etc etc compared to what they used to be.
IIRC you'd get endless pages of results, now the results stop after 2 pages or so. And half the first page is paid for sponsored results, and adverts, so it really is bad.
It's a process called "enshitification" and we are getting served it big time, in so many aspects of life these days.
Surely things were supposed to go the other way.
But it seems that we peaked in everything, some time ago.
In terms of the internet, the golden era was the noughties imo.
In terms of general standard of living and quality and enjoyment of life, much harder to say. But once again the noughties were definitely much better in terms of cost of living. And not feeling like you've literally paid half a days wages or more just for a few very basic provisions, to keep you going for the next couple of days, sandwiches for work lunches, evening meals etc.
Even newer cars these days are far shitter than they were 15 years ago. There is just so much that can go wrong that even a minor bump can result in a new car needing to be written of, as they are no longer cost effective to fix, due to the increasing complexity of all the electronic technical driver assistance that is now added, like it or not. Many believe that cars peaked around 15 years ago, in terms of affordability, reliability, performance, and repairability. And I absolutely agree with that. The main dealers are stitching everyone up with propriety codes etc meaning everything now has to go through them with post 2020 cars, and they charge about 3 times as much as independent small back street garages etc.
Before I was even born I gather than the 1950s were the last proper boom decade. Probably hence my grandparents having 4 children, and that being the norm, and they still had plenty of money, a nice big house, although my Grandfather did have a successful career. My childhood in the 70s and 80s was pretty idyllic, at least in parts, although I gather things were very hard economically for many during those decades.
In terms of personal freedoms and privacy, the future looks very bleak indeed. It's just as well I don't have anything major to be concerned about, but that's not the point.