The vast majority of the web now is manipulative, sterile, corporate, surveillance-ridden and aimed at making money. The web that has passed was more about people.

I think the internet peaked in about 2008. I pick that year because by then, everything I care about worked fine: online banking, online shopping that wasn't mostly just Amazon, newspapers and magazines, and that summer, I watched the 2008 Beijing Olympics over a relatively slow network link (I think a 2 Mbps DSL line or something like that), so streaming video worked fine by then. I also learned a ton of stuff from various bloggers after the 2008 financial crisis. And Netflix was still DVD by mail, which I liked a lot better than the Netflix of today.

Not easy to think of things that have actually gotten better since then. Many of the stores I used to shop at have been driven out of business by Amazon and what's left of the blogosphere of the time has migrated to things like Medium and Substack, which I guess is more convenient (and monetizable) for writers, but is more annoying for readers.

Newspapers and magazines mostly still work fine but it's hard to think of a way in which they're actually better, they just haven't gotten very much worse.