I used to get sent a monthly cheque for $1K around the turn of the millennium simply to have a link on my home page, such was the power of Pagerank back then. This was handy as it allowed me to invest time into learning web development, plus the site was educational and paid for its existence.

Producing content was harder back then and the web was a lot smaller. Google most definitely still use links to rank but are much more likely to discount/devalue links than they did historically.