The internet isn’t worse, it’s just the web. The Internet is much better actually:

• There are more subsea cables with more capacity, the Internet is meshed better these days. Losing any single subsea cable doesn’t have as much of an impact as it used to.

• Additionally you don’t need to cache stuff with reverse proxies in each AS anymore because long distance transmission has gotten way cheaper, and more available.

• The last mile issues are also solved, though for now only in densly populated areas in advanced economies. With fiber connections to individual dwellings you get scaling that’s infinite for practical purposes. This also means you can have a gigabit connection end to end without bloating buffers on DSL or DOCSIS modems.