Seconded. Blogs are great but the old school blogs were David vs Goliath. I remember how much fun it was to cycle through my web ring and see all the extremely creative sites. Some flash, some just clever JavaScript, none of it used jquery or react or components. In fact, one was a giant anchor area image divided up into sections (not sliced designs, one whole image! With target boxes for clickable regions).

I still have my deviantart profile from the inevitable collapse into corporate. Web design took a turn for the smashing and now it all looks the same.

Everyone was still too cautious to type their credit card in or something. There was nothing to monetize. So, yeah, every website was someone's small passion project, with handwritten HTML.

State of the art for discovery used to be browsing a (manually?) curated directory on Yahoo. Google appeared and was a mind-blowing sea change. That's probably the peak, Google's inception up until jackass SEO marketers appeared. During that window, search worked fantastically over content that was fun to read.