I'm currently diving into some fairly fringe and very dead tech so my perspective is a bit skewed but I seem to be relying on the wayback machine an absolutely absurd amount lately.
Because the internet has started dying. Everyone though it would take at least some time before AI generated content kind of started stifling the internet, making it hard to find things, hard to figure out what is real. But, its already ramped up. I at least thought it would be a few more months and more focused on election. But at least me, I seem to see its impact in every YouTube video, generated content is appear…
There's an argument the way AI is getting so much focus has resulted in a neglect of this kind of stuff after years/decades of it sticking around at mostly fairly low cost.
I'd say a bigger source of harm has been the endless iteration in agile practices meaning old stuff is treated as low priority because the business focus is always on adding new stuff. It's a lot harder to argue up the management chain that making something more stable will have longer term gains than A/B testing several new designs. The amount of sites that repeatedly destroyed their old content with a redesign is a bit absurd. A LOT of websites feel like they could benefit from improving their fundamental experiences and it's been so long since that was a priority that it's virtually an impossibility to untangle it at this point.