I personal sites could easily be found, and filtered, or sorted to provide interesting ones, then Personal sites would be booming.
That is why I created my own domains list: https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
It contains links with properties in JSON. I can find personal things using "personal" tags. I can filter them using numerical "page_rating_votes".
It's why I upkeep a list of current webrings - https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm , a list of personal web directories - https://brisray.com/web/indiedirs.htm - and "alternative" search engines that can find them - https://brisray.com/web/altsearch.htm
Personal sites are not dead. I've got one, and it is entirely fulfilling its function. Other people have them too.
Internet search is pretty broken, I'll agree with you. That said, Kagi and Marginalia both seem to tackle the problems with surfacing old and/or independent content. And people are bypassing the search-engines by constructing link pages, link blogs and web-rings, and seem to be doing fine.
1. A walled garden? Run by Google? Aside from locking this discoverability away in a walled garden, how many years before Google kills it out of corporate disinterest?
2. So, blogs with Google tracking promoted higher? Blogs with copyright information excluded as it is not legal for LLM's to train on it? What do you think would happen?
It's fraught with problems.