back then the indie scene was super interesting. https://experimentalgameplay.com/ was full of gems and igf had plenty interesting concepts too with lot less focus on trying to make them marketable.
edit: rewrote the whole paragraph to be more clear and remove unnecessary negative connotation against mainstream indie which I do not share
thanks to early experiment success and profitability indie games managed to get a lot of visibility and the genre exploded. whole business revolve now around making indies meet buyers (kickstarter, indiegogo, steam greenlight); as a compromise they lost some of the original experimental nature and gained in term of polishing and content quality.
I'd say the sector transformed; it lost some innovation, gained some marketability. there's less explorative projects now and they are harder to find, but you can still find them; currently itch.io seems to be a trove of these kind of content, but the lack of curation makes hard to find anything among the pile of crap (no offence intended, it's just Sturgeon's law)
The problem now is that there's so many indie games out there that it's a lot harder to get discovered.