They didn’t eat the entire Internet. They didn’t even eat the web. They set up parallel walled gardens. The web is still there. Personal websites just don’t scale to the masses. This is fine and probably for the best.
More advertisements? Any advertisements make the site worse. More makes it more worse.
It's so inexpensive to have a website these days, even one that pulls in a substantial number of visitors, that it's hard to make an argument that ads are necessary to pay for hosting.
Once upon a time, I could search for something on Yahoo or Google and get nothing but those kinds of websites in search results, even when some central repository sites like Wikipedia were starting to take root.
Everything changed when the SEO nation attacked, and nobody expected the social media inquisition.
Period true search methods (webrings, curated indexes, portals and early search engines) are gone and so is the fighting chance for this kind of projects.
Not quite sure what their definition of that is, since I've seen recently updated things. Without CSS? Without JS? Maybe just websites that never make a JS fetch request once they're loaded.