Even pure signal can be overwhelming these days when so much good stuff exists.
Which brings us to the (as far as I know unsolved) question of supporting large scale discovery of the web without drifting into enshittification.
Some sort of decentralized index that will be distributed in a torrent-like manner might work but that requires curation too: Who and with what criteria can add an entry etc.
Bottom line is that the walled gardens did not exist, they evolved because the original web was missing critical components of usability. They exploited a vacuum.
To fill the vacuum with something more benevolent we need to go back and solve these problems. The rest will be history.