I absolutely agree with you that whether Google is intentionally diabolical or not is up in the air. My reason for quoting Brad there is to succinctly recount a history where Google has been a menace (deliberate or not) to individual blogs and websites. Blog rolls were absolutely a great way to discover new blogs and were hardly “link farms” but were an incredibly valuable resource. (An equivalent to modern friend lists.)

Where I don’t agree with you is in the portrayal of the Web as largely comprised of link farms and “few legitimate pages”. I spend a lot of my time cataloging the hidden corners of the Web and it is mostly individuals working on their personal Web projects. Spam is simple to identify (much more so than ‘clickbait’) and many of the reasons people don’t read personal websites any more isn’t because interesting and mind-blowing projects on the Web are too rare. (I don’t have statistics to back this up, but I feel like they are more common on the Web than on social media.)