If the majority of people don't want to use this, but instead just want to yell about politics and the news cycle, that's their problem and doesn't really diminish the achievements of the web.
What I highly overestimated was people's thirst for knowledge. I really thought that by this time I would be unemployable as the average young person would just be so learned that I wouldn't be able to keep up. The advantage of growing up with the internet would be just so huge.
I would have never guessed that the average young person instead almost has a type of learning disability from being addicted to political nonsense, stupid videos and gossip.
Everything is there from what I envisioned in 1995 though. It is just this useless, pernicious aspect dwarfs what I envisioned then in terms of popularity.
As long as you are willing to enter a legal gray area, you can get access to some interesting books; but these are still an insanely small fraction of "most of the books in existence".
Recently got into late 19th century Mexican literature, and I find virtually everything I look for. I can find books from small political presses who may have printed only 100 copies. Here's another kink that I have, which basically would have been my most self-indulgent dream as a child: I can look at the ads for other books that are in the backs of 50-200 year-old books, or listings of the rest of the books in a series, and find those books instantly.
Between shadow libraries, actual libraries, hobbyist public domain wranglers, etc, it's hard not to find a book.
This means I can go through all the literature I think could maybe be important and just check and read or move on. For scholarly work, this makes such a big difference that it makes me think the pre-internet PhDs are incomparable with post-internet ones.