I think there's probably a lot more trash today. There's a lot more of everything.

The number of books published each year in the US has grown by something like 300x over the past one hundred years, if you only count traditional publishing (and not print-on-demand).

There’s lots more today. You can go to Amazon and search for any very specific niche subject and find AI generated books that claim to address that subject. The ability to churn out useless garbage with few resources is at an all time high and will continue to increase.

I’ve always wondered about that. Yeah, you can objectively say Shakespeare was a master of the written word based on how many new words and phrases he coined and all that, but who are we to otherwise judge the qualitative merits of Elizabethan writing? How does a modern gauge whether Christopher Marlowe or any other contemporary authors are any better or worse than the Bard himself? What if there were other plays that were superior but simply got lost to history?

As an ancient Greek, Homer would certainly never have worn formal clothing of a civilization that did not yet even exist...