Has it gone this way because of the ever-increasing monetization of it? I'm inclined to think so, but it's also possible it's just the natural result of becoming more widely used. Tragedy of the commons and all that.
If not for external pressure to have it, I'd not find it worth ~$1,000/yr for home Internet and ~$400/yr for my cell phone's Internet service. That's a hell of a lot of entertainment money to put toward something else, and that's before you pay for anything on top of it (say, streaming services). In fact, it'd almost be worth paying that much to get my wasted Internet time back (he writes, on HN).
In my teens I couldn't wait to jack straight in to the 'net. Now? Screw it. I'd rather live entirely in meatspace. I think the whole thing's been, overall, a mistake that I wish we could obliterate.
But I'm also keenly aware things will change, so I see this as a foundation rather than a place to stay. You can't just stay fixed in place and expect to have any input on the future. I've been back on Mastodon more since it has a lot of the good parts of past Twitter with less of the bad. I wrote an article that did numbers here called "ActivityPub could be the future." I pulled it since I got a bit cynical about the whole thing, but I might use it as the basis for something new.