Money does this to everything.

Radio used to be cool, now it's mostly ads.

Circulating pamphlets was once a potent political tool, now they come sandwiched between ads in a newspaper that nobody reads.

Evaluate a randomly chosen NFT-referent for artistic merit and see how it stack up to a randomly chosen pre-nft art.

I'm still optimistic about the web though. It's more configurable than the other media. We may yet find a way to wall off the advertising cancer and make some space for cool stuff to survive.