The quality of content on the internet has gone way down in my opinion. There is a proliferation of content that is so adwords optimized as to be useless, AI or cheapest content farm written, an annoying ad filled video, or some combination of all of those. It's still ok for computing and programming topics, but for almost any other non-fiction or reference type material I greatly prefer books, and older books at that. Not antique books, but even those from about 20 years ago still have much more content and better editing. I'm speaking of topics like gardening, homesteading, military history etc.
Counter-point - it didn't, SEO services quality went up.
Internet was always full of shit but when everything linked to everything else there was a way for search engines to find the valuable posts, with search engine being a gateway to everything that is no longer the case.