Back in the 90s when the Internet became a thing, it was common knowledge that because normal people made websites, that you should take things with a grain of salt. There was a bit of an overreaction to this, as the general feeling at the time was to trust nothing on the Internet.

In the 00s and 10s, the quality of discoverable content improved: reddit and stackechange had experts (at a higher rate than the rest of the net at least). It was the era where search was good, Google wasn't evil (good results that separated the ads are entirely why they won against AskJeeves and Yahoo), and SEO was still gestating in Adam Smith's wastebasket.

Now Google and Bing are polluted with SEO-optimized content farms designed to waste your time and show you as many ads as possible. They hunger for new content (for the SEO gods demand regular posts), and the cheapest way to do this is an underpaid "author" spewing out a GPT-created firehose of content.

SEO has ruined search, and content farms have made what few usable results there are even less trustworthy.

So yes, the Internet has fundamentally changed in the last 9 months.