The reliability question is difficult to answer as the current internet includes a lot of the information that was available in the early forms.

So with the current internet you get access to those RFCs, much usenet and mailing list content from early days, and videos of people from that era reliably recounting how the network operated. Plus all the benefits of things like Stackoverflow, Wikipedia, and others that give more context than you could get solely from the early internet.

However, the edges of the network weren't weaponized as they are today. So there was probably less likelihood of an early internet user coming away as an anti-vaxxer/flat-earther.