Step 1 to learning more about that subject involves travel and the juice is suddenly no longer worth the squeeze.

This position is wild to me. Kids go to school every day, where there is a library that has interlibrary loans as an option. The barrier you are suggesting is mostly imaginary. Libraries today offer ebooks, too, no travel required, and a higher barrier to entry (and thus, higher barrier to spreading misinformation), than the internet.

I'm honestly frustrated you would outright say I'm arguing in bad faith and I don't know where that accusation comes from. "Libraries are hard" is a really bad argument, you are pretending there is a larger barrier than there is and asserting it prohibits information transfer without any evidence to demonstrate it. You can ask the internet anything and have some search engine or LLM tell you why yoy are right, and that isn't exactly useful feedback.

Here's a bad faith argument: you seem to want the ease of asking a search bar for an answer without doing any of the work to understand the context of the response provided or its accuracy.

Here's a better faith one: people will use the tools available to them to the best they learn and feel inclined to do, and in both the past and the present paradigms, lots of people choose the lazy means of information consumption (what the paper/radio/TV says) than the more intellectually intensive (actual research or deferment to subject matter expert recommendation). Catering to that dynamic has been a net detriment to all society to the benefit of people selling impressions for the particularly "engaging" content being offered. I think we need to find a way to incentivize content creation and dispersion differently than what we're doing right now.