Oh no! The Internet is more easily accessible providing more knowledge and access to millions worldwide! It's not limited to our extremely exclusive clique of 1337 hackers who also all happen to be white, college-educated American men!
All the potential for good that made users so enthusiastic (as we now know: over-enthusiastic) about it until the early 00s (maybe 10s) still exist, it's just big tech and other businesses have hijacked the community-driven governance and narrative for private gains.
All the cool ((internet) cultural, but not necessarily technical) stuff that existed and exists... you'd never find out about it today if you weren't there and already know what to look for (and even then search result quality has gone down the drain due to massive spam. Not that you can reasonably filter search results to not include businesses or other SEO spam for instance...). Of course things that don't make money/grab attention eventually are "rationalised away" or forgotten about in this ungodly screaming contest.
Not all is bad; it's just the drop in average quality of substance and intransparency of its gatekeepers that worries me. I always keep my hope that a diverse array of communities continue to exist in which cool things happen on a regular basis. Mainstream social media is not this place though.
In seriousness, the radicalism of the early internet was great for autodidacts, and I loved it. It shaped me as a person and I still don't have or need a university degree.
The thing that was nice in the past was that it seemed so easy to find other people finding their own path. It was a bit less commercial and a bit more communal. It was a great thing, but communities have a finite capacity for on boarding people. It is easy to squash that, and it was definitely squashed pretty hard as the internet popularised.