I miss when people made stuff because they loved making stuff, not because they wanted to get rich.
They still do, but you'll never find it in the existing layout. The only stuff that bubbles to the surface is so heavily SEO engineered and hyper-monetized that it's got to be sixteen ads on the back of an infomercial in order to break even.
Very true. The old internet perfectly showed how people are happy to create and share content as enthusiasts, eg. wikipedia, reddit/forums, and lot of X rated amateur stuff.
Since then, capitalism has decided to leech on and ruin most of these. Now we have more content, but worse quality - because for the end user a genuine reddit review of a product was more useful than a targeted ad, and most ppl prefered to look at the videos of some random couple sharing it as a kink, rather than some endlessly polished fake amateur video.