in 1998, google (er, alphabet) got its initial round of $100,000. You're not wrong but things in 1998 were weird. it wasn't clear that the internet should or would be commercial at all. 1998 was a big bubble, because we didn't know, at all, how the internet should work. c10k wasn't met yet. Parents (not grandparents) thought the internet was scary.

Maybe big G (er alphabet) is indeed cannabalizing it's own resources to juice adsense revenue. It's different than the late 90's though. For example pets.com, or moo.com. There are ideas that were tried that make money now. In the beginning it was just weird. all sorts of crazy stuff was tried.