This is a topic that has been discussed to death. That’s okay. Maybe I can add something useful by suggesting one way forward.
Back when the internet existed, we had large quantities of information, with a good signal to noise ratio, and it was posted in an easy-to-access format. I’m not going to say it was free, because it was never free not could it have been free. It was built on people sharing. Some of them were engaged in “content marketing”, but that’s okay, because they were giving you information in return for something. Others contributed non-paywalled content as a way to “do their share”. They read what others posted, so they were contributing by making things other folks wanted to read.
How can we go back to those days?
I honestly have no idea, but I have some things we should try.
We should have a system for posting our personal recommendations so that others can use them. This is efficient: you read something bad so that hundreds of other people don’t read it.
On top of that, we need aggregators of the best recommendation pages.
We need to popularize things like a markdown file on Github. You can type the content right in your browser and you don’t have to worry about polishing things up.
We should push for a return to plain html pages with limited styling. That will allow authors to focus on writing rather than what people say when they read it.
We need to develop a web culture that tries to make the world a better place, rather than going with enshittification and hot takes.