The Dark Web as You Know It Is a Myth

The lies were incredibly obvious to anyone that's read about the previous incidences of Satanic Ritual Abuse panics, but it still took the press some time to catch on. It also inspired the usual crop of well-meaning fools saying things like - "well clearly these children are traumatised and this is their reality, even if there is no evidence"

There are literally dozens of websites on the darknet that source much of the content that is disturbing on 4chan and act as exchange points for such content.

However, both you and the article are correct that there's nothing particularly surprising or disturbing about this -- there are plenty of other dark corners of the internet where such things lurk. The interesting parts of the dark web are the same parts as the normal web -- the deep web. Just like with the normal internet, you need to know where you're going and a few of the right knocks before you see anything really interesting.

On the open internet, a few magic nondescript addresses, a few specific keys that are indistinguishable from random ones -- and suddenly, you're playing fluid dynamics engineer on someone's hardware instead of just reading about fluid dynamics. Similarly, there are dark net sites that are essentially access portals to other places on the internet, are generally not advertised to people (and so don't make the news rounds like Silk Road or Tor Wiki or Freedom Hosting), and are considerably more interesting than things like hosting child pornography, selling drugs, or instructing on how to make bombs (which is what most of the surface dark net consists of).

Everything else is just showrooms and advertising posters.