[NeedMoreTea]

It feels that way because it has been exactly as you describe. I can only assume it's youngsters who have been doing the undeserved downvoting. If you look at the timeline, you can get a feel for why, and who:

1988/9 First ISPs and connections outside academia

1993 Eternal September, AOL let the great unwashed out on to the net. Damn annoying for six months or so, but the net recovered.

1994 First spam, and colossal in scale. Two bottom feeding US lawyers filling every usenet group with US Green Card spam.

1995 NSF end their ban on online commercial activity.

First e-commerce kicks off, and it's all a bit hobby-esque, and even large businesses are adopting netiquette habits. Like linking out, providing chatty informative pages for no other reason than "because", etc. Putting an e-commerce order somewhere might get you a lovely long chatty thank you email direct from the owner, or a hand written note in the box. The internet still feels like something remarkably different to meatspace.

By the millennium, the year AdWords was born, as the first dot com boom turned into a full on idiocy fuelled bubble, it was the birth of bait and switch. There's a whole ballooning category of "internet marketers" with gloriously scummy SEO, fraudulent sales tactics, learn to spam better courses and worse. Like all easy way to riches sales, the only way to get rich is with the easy way to riches book, subscription or course parting fools from money.

Now everyone commercial, from the largest 5 world companies down, are internet marketers of the worst possible interpretation of the term. Commerce, scam and affiliate slice forced into everything. Bait and switch all the way down.