Another aspect is that you could actually find these sites in the past. I have vague recollections of spending hours going through a bunch of garbage to find some goldmine Web 1.0 site. I don’t remember the last time I found an old site like these

That’s a huge stretch of the definition. Back then discovery was often via people’s personal “directory” web pages.

Sharing links with MSN and AIM came much later when you could be online significantly more.