I think that the balance has swung so far due to how obnoxious and callous the adtech industry has become, that right now many people (including me) would consider it acceptable "collateral damage" if a bunch of decent sites would become unviable and shut down. In many areas is an over-abundandance of content with scarce attention, so even if majority of the providers shut down, there would still be "enough".
And also IMHO the business has changed over the 20 years you mention - back then, sufficient compute power and bandwidth to run a site were meaningful and more users directly required more expenses; but right now the hosting costs are trivial (e.g. I'm involved in a non-monetized project with a few million views/month / 100k MAU running off of a single small VM that can get hosted for free) and the primary expense is your time - so if you want to make some content and spend time on that, you don't need to monetize it; if you're willing to spend an evening or two, then paying a few dollars for a domain name won't be an obstacle; and if in some community there is no one who wants to put in their time if there's no money in it, well, then there's no big loss if that community doesn't have that site, as apparently no one cares.
And also IMHO the business has changed over the 20 years you mention - back then, sufficient compute power and bandwidth to run a site were meaningful and more users directly required more expenses; but right now the hosting costs are trivial (e.g. I'm involved in a non-monetized project with a few million views/month / 100k MAU running off of a single small VM that can get hosted for free) and the primary expense is your time - so if you want to make some content and spend time on that, you don't need to monetize it; if you're willing to spend an evening or two, then paying a few dollars for a domain name won't be an obstacle; and if in some community there is no one who wants to put in their time if there's no money in it, well, then there's no big loss if that community doesn't have that site, as apparently no one cares.