When Google first came out, it was amazing how effective it was. In the years following, we have had a feedback loop of adtech bullshit.
Those websites are long gone. First, because search engines defaulted to promoting 'recent content' on HTTPS websites, which eliminates a lot of informational sites that were not SSL-secured and archived on university web servers for example.
Second, because the time and effort required to compile this information today feels wasted because it can be essentially copied wholesale and reproduced on a content-hungry blogspam website, often without attribution to the original author.
In its place are cynical Substacks, Twitters or Tiktoks doing growth marketing ahead of an inevitable book deal or online course sales pitch.
Search is a struggle to index the web as~is. Like biologists look at a species from afar and document their behavior. It's not like, hey if you want to be in the bird book you can lay 6 eggs at most, they should be smooth egg shaped, light in color and no larger than 12 cm. You must be able to fly and make bird sounds only and only during the day. Most important you must build your own nest!
Little Jimmy has many references under his articles, he is not paginating his archives properly, he has many citation.... Lets just take him behind the barn and shoot him.
Discovering them is indeed hard, but it has always been hard - that's why search engines were such a gigantic improvement initially, they found more than the zero that most people had seen. But searches only ever skimmed the surface, and there's almost certainly no mechanical way to accurately identify the hidden gems - it's just straight chaos, there's a lot of good and bad and insane.
Find a small site or two, and explore their webring links, like The Good Old Days. They're still alive and healthy because it keeps getting easier to create and host them.
Also if you squint hard enough, they're massively more common now. They're just usually hidden by adblockers because they're run by Disqus or Outbrain or similar (i.e. complete junk).