There is more to it than that... 20 years ago most of the people on the internet were likely similar to you, so most of their desired results were similar to yours.
Now people on the internet since the early 2000 are a minority compared to the "democratized" flood of users who joined in the mobile crapplication phase and started skewing search results towards simpler, less useful results.
SEO and ads didn't help, but the whole ecosystem broke the model.