The algorithm of giving you what you prefer when there are too many choices is inevitable. Alternative is a bunch of people deciding what it should and should not give you. It really doesn't matter who those people work for.[1]
Positive feedback loop and information bubbles are not great but "the algorithm" is really not worse in this regard than leaving in a small village.
1. The algorithm is still a bunch of people but that's orthogonal to your point. People will prefer algorithms fitting their needs better and they are able to switch (yes monopolies, but that's a different thread already).
As far as I remember standards were not higher. They were different.
Plus really, the cartoons I remember were full of stuff like find a sleeping pills in parents cabinet, give somebody as a joke, put a pin on a chair so somebody sits on it etc. Racism everywhere. Stuff that is even hard to find nowadays because they had to scrub it. Sexually suggestive themes, like have you watched lion king? Or anything really... it seemed to be way more explicit.
We luckily tend to remember past as better than it was. There's also nostalgia element and there's cultural difference. Just like there are different cultures around the globe and most think that other ones are gross, the same happens in the time dimension.
edit: to be clear, things could be better, we should point out what's wrong and try to fix it, but with some more decent optimization function than "proximity to good the old days"
This was not possible to do at scale 10+ years ago.
To me more fundamental is access to information that anybody has above certain age. Yes you still need to know how to interpret it, that's one of the most valuable skills nowadays, but in the past you had just no way of fact checking and doing more research on what has been given to you apart from spending hours in library which would not be very productive unless you were interested in some relatively popular chunk of history.
You get served stuff targeted at you but it's just information, and you have a way to put it in a bigger context. It was not possible before. The fact that you learn about unknown unknowns through a magic giving content box is also amazing. It is not perfect and have its issues, and I would love for everybody to just garden their homepages which I could visit like it's .. oh shit well 30 years ago, but I'm not sure I want to spend time on gardening mine when I can learn so much instead.
It's fascinating!
What the concern is has to do with scale, and whether this old problem is about to get a lot worse with new technologies. I tend to agree with this, I think the way information scales these days makes this much more dangerous a phenomenon.
It's very odd IMO. Feels a bit like religious evangelism.