A related source of great frustration: put some good stuff on the web. Lots of people link to it but almost entirely from social media platforms where every link is a nofollow. Somebody else working on gaming the system with SEO makes a less valuable and useful thing, but obtains (by subterfuge or diligent direct asking) some non-nofollow links. Your high-quality content will be outranked in search results by the other less-high-quality quality content.

A reasonable improvement to this, to reinvigorate the hyperlink: social media platforms could stop using nofollow for links put in by users who themselves have built up a degree of reputation.