A related source of great frustration: put some good stuff on the web. Lots of people link to it but almost entirely from social media platforms where every link is a nofollow. Somebody else working on gaming the system with SEO makes a less valuable and useful thing, but obtains (by subterfuge or diligent direct asking) some non-nofollow links. Your high-quality content will be outranked in search results by the other less-high-quality quality content.
A reasonable improvement to this, to reinvigorate the hyperlink: social media platforms could stop using nofollow for links put in by users who themselves have built up a degree of reputation.
It really does seem hard to get visitors these days, even for original niche content. The first page of Google search results is half social/video/news carousels instead of genuine long-term content, and a lot of the other links point to repetitive articles published by generic big-name websites that never really add anything new.
A reasonable improvement to this, to reinvigorate the hyperlink: social media platforms could stop using nofollow for links put in by users who themselves have built up a degree of reputation.