Some survival bias maybe, but I agree, content was better, and I believe mostly because there was more work put into the content. Today a lot of work goes into presentation, into using words in common enough dictionary ( see https://blog.xkcd.com/2015/09/22/a-thing-explainer-word-chec... )
But don't forget that there was less content, and soon the era of blogs rose, for which I read a fascinating description lately: