I wonder how the decline in personal blogs and websites (who even starts one today, when you can just be popular on youtube/twitter/instagram), affects rankings due to lack of websites linking to other websites.
I used to read programming books not for a laundry list of features, but to get inside the author's head and start thinking about programming the way they did. It's not as simple as a simple declarative statement. Many times the author themselves couldn't express the value I got. I don't see how you reduce that any and I'm not sure I'd want to consume it if you could.
Even for the big media sites, they mostly link to other pages on their own website.