Part of it is that most links, even when the content is good, come with some amount of pain in accessing it. Cookie banners, in-line ads re-flowing the content, pop-over ads, "subscribe to my mailing list" popups, donation begging popups, long-winded articles needlessly stuffed full of SEO keywords, auto playing videos, and most websites so full of all this stuff they jank out my phone and make it heat up.

I remember the web as fondly as you do. I spent hours on StumbleUpon just finding cool websites. But nowadays even if the content is just as good (it rarely is), the websites are just so bad.