I have been playing with the idea of making good old internet portal. A curated list of links to the good stuff. No FB, medium, Instagram or anything like that.
There's https://curlie.org , it even links to some old-style websites in its collection. I think there are some other sites with similar ideas too, where you can create groups and share bookmarks ( like https://groups.diigo.com )
I had the same idea, I think this is the ultimate solution. Would need to be easy to add links and allow moderators to approve submitted websites and provide a good search capability. Would only include quirky websites.
Portals are still sometimes made to make it easier to discover independent content, you aren't the only one concerned about this. However, the problem is that independent creators often stop paying for hosting or domain registration at some point, so any manually created directory eventually abounds with 404s.
I would suspect that even fans of independent content would be turned off by browsing through a large amount of Wayback Machine links, because Archive.org insert their own markup, and often the images in posts don't get archived.
People like using the Wayback Machine when they know that certain content used to exist, but not necessarily to discover new things unfamiliar to them.
Just bring back DMOZ, it was by no means perfect but was a great curated directory of the old internet despite SEOs always trying to spam it. Apparently Curlie is trying this but I haven't really looked much into it: https://curlie.org/en