Back then, you got a piece of land, and really could do what you wanted with it. Build a business, farm, etc. some government taxes but nothing crazy. But you had to deal with criminals, lack of access to medical care, and lack of education.
Now to do the same, you have a slew of building codes, regulations, zoning laws, and are basically forced to have municipal services. Higher Taxes to pay the roads, police force, fire fighters, education services etc.
However, home owners can still just have an egg or vegetable stand at the end of their driveway. It won’t be the same as having a storefront in town, but it’s still doable without the overhead.
Similarly, as the internet matures, we’re going to see more and more overhead to sustain a “basic” business.
But you can still have a personal blog ran in your closet, for lower-level traffic.
The analogy isn’t perfect, but unfortunately as threat-actor’s budgets increase, so too do their quality/sophistication of their attacks. If it was cheap to defend against some of the more costly attacks, they would find a different vector.
The answer, to me, is some tangential technology that is some mix of federated or decentralization. Not in a crypto bro sense, but just some tech whose fundamental design solves the inherit problem with how our web is built today.
Then threat actors will find another way, rinse and repeat…