Yea, I lean this way too.
The internet is and always has been just a lot of people. Scams have been rampant since it left the research labs, as have all kinds of vile human behavior.
The scale has definitely increased, but I think that might just mean that more people (by % of people alive) are exposed, and are talking about it. When it was just early nerds, nobody else knew what the heck a BBS was, but it still sounded a lot like local government/business/church/etc.
If you run a community, you have to deal with this stuff, regardless of how you run it. Small ones can get lucky and need dramatically less with a good starter crowd, but they can also have one messy event destroy the whole thing in an instant.
Zeitgeist-level systems like Twitter (well. previously at least) are new compared to '89, but uh. Have you seen what governments have done in the past century+, or Christianity has been doing for a thousand years? When you get millions of people, you get a lot of power, and have a lot of hidden awfulness. Always. No moderation system works at scale. The scale has changed, but not the behaviors or outcomes.
(as a corollary: yes I think we're actually better off without global hubs like Twitter. We'll keep fracturing and centralizing and re-fracturing likely forever though, and the smaller options have never gone away, you just have to look for them like has always been necessary - they're small)