The media ecosystem many of us had lived in included that but was not almost entirely that.

We had local newspapers, weeklies, and magazines, with local owners and editors, printing at local print shops, subsidized by local advertisers, dropped in boxes and stacked at local community hubs by local kids. Same for local radio stations and local television networks, although these had such high capital and regulation requirements that many of them were already being soaked up into larger networks more quickly.

As the online stuff emerged, we had local BBS's, and local forums and websites and blogs operated by local people, made known through the above local media channels or just through word of mouth.

Writers and editors and artists and merchants would be real people that circulated in the community, who would encounter readers/viewers/consumers face to face. Earnest small businesses that served a niche in the community could call up and get a reasonable price for an ad slot or classified listing without always having to bid in an auction against against an national brand with an effectively unlimited budget.

The last 10-20 years of the Internet, of social media and consolidation and the "Creator Economy", didn't just "scale up what we already had" -- it scaled up one small thing that we already had and displaced more or less everything else.