Agreed, for all the reasons stated. It has sadly gone downhill fast over the last few years especially.. Crappy AI content, especially on youtube, is another new factor that is dragging things down. Anyone can do that, there is no expertise, personality, or knowledge required any more.
Also all the individuality and uniqueness of finding obscure niche websites and things like that has been vanishing at a rapid rate. All the smaller sites are getting swallowed up by the corporate social media giants and Reddit. Where censorship is pretty hardline, and self expression is limited. Google is largely enabling this by becoming a far worse search engine than it used to be, the returns are now dominated by sponsored websites, and anything interesting seems to be no longer appearing at all.
Google image search is a prime example, now it no longer scours the whole internet looking for the search term, but instead every result directs straight to fucking Pinterest or Instagram. It's turning into Skynet.
What was once something amazing, and still could be, is turning into a pale shadow of what could have been, and of what it already has been but is no longer.