Signal to noise ratio was a lot better back then I think. Nowadays you're more likely to find the likes of ThePrimagen than Beej, if you even make it past the sea of content farm tutorials.
I think the overall increase in resources more than compensates for the noise.
When i was growing up (medium sized town early 2000s) i read all the computer books in my library. There was like 4, i remember one was a redhat for dummies, another was on vrml 1.0 (this was a bit outdated at the time), i dont remember the others. Sure there was some info on the internet, but it was few and far between. Random home pages by and large weren't even remotely on the level of a wikipedia article let alone a text book.
Now a days, if i want to learn about computer things, there are like a billion resources. Text based tutorials, youtube videos, almost anything you can imagine. And that is just the googlable ones. If i am willing to do something a tiny bit illegal, i can get basically any book ever published from libgen.
The available resources the modern person has is just staggering.
So much of what's available is unstructured and disjointed, answering questions without any sort of method or system, not to mention frequently harmful in being both written with certainty and incorrectness.
While there were certainly fewer books in the late 90s and early 00s, they were well put together and comprehensive, often reference-style works. You could learn an entire programming language from having access to a single book.
