>the web was hard to navigate and you relied on webpages "befriending" each other and helping you navigate to similar pages. That was real navigation and it had terrible recall.
This is exactly why internet was decentralized. A network of social connections between small online spaces people congregated in was essential to find what you wanted. It was somewhat of a replication of the old world - where in order to find an answer, you first had to get into relevant circles (eg. a local club, university, etc). You didn't just get an answer to your question, you inevitably had to sift through a lot of other content and learn about new places.
Google cut through all of that. Ideally, you could just get the answer you wanted, and not even see the rest of the site. The first order effect was that everyone's life get better. The second order effect is that it killed the old decentralized web, because random discovery nearly died down.
LLM are only the next step on this, but I don't think they change much. I think it's mostly going to damage reddit. A lot of reddit questions are an attempt to find an answer to something that google is too dumb to find - but llms may be able to.
The defense to this - are chatrooms, like discord. Sometimes I see people complaining that so much information is now 'hidden' on discord. But that's the exact point. Making information hard to get means people are forced to interact with each other. This creates incentives to contribute.
That's the future. Chatrooms may be replaced by voice based vr, hard to say. We already passed the peak of public information dissemination, and are going back to old style "ask at the university", just more decentralized and online.