I was there and can tell you we had a peak of quality maybe in the 00s and have been going backwards towards worse than the early Internet really fast in the last decade or so.

Sure, if you want to find info on something, now you can now watch a glitzy 1080p video with lots of fancy graphics on Youtube of some guy explaining it - it will have a clickbait title and be interspected with Ads, sponsor segments, and it will take half an hour to explain something which in the old days you could read all about on a website in 10 minutes and actually came out knowing more about it.

The funny bit is that the old website is still there, but if you use Google to search for it that video and another 20 like it will be shoved in front of you, along with "sponsored results" and a ton of SEO-optimized clickbait websites which you'll have to wade through to find the one needle in between all that straw (and meanwhile the system is designed to distract you away from what you want, so you'll have to battle your own subconscious pulls to manage to stay the course).

And don't get me started on how you actually had a decent expectation of privacy on the Internet back in the late 90s and early 00s whilst nowadays all dominat players almost force you (in some cases actually do) to give them your phone number to better link your various online and offline profiles in multiple devices.

IMHO, the actual Internet in software, usability and software systems terms now is not superior to what we had in the late 90s, early 00s, it's the electronics tech (mainly thanks to bandwidth and portable computing devices) that's superior.