This is an excellent point. You're younger than my eldest child, and I was active on the internet from way back when it wasn't available to the general public. That has to color our experiences -- even if only in that what you consider the "old days" and what I consider the "old days" are entirely different eras.
Every where banned you for gore, child porn, harassment, encouraging suicide.
I really don't think you should be trying to normalize 4chan as thats just the way the internet is.
The video game/tabletop game boards on 4chan were fairly normal for boards at that time, and it's not like everyone who was active on 4chan was there to post or read /b/. You might dip into it for a laugh or dare now and then, but at least when I was younger it was more like the internet equivalent of sneaking into the abandoned house down the street: a "dangerous" thing that felt cool to do.
Like I said in my original post, that's the lens through which I viewed the internet. It could be different from yours.
I'm not trying to 'normalize' 4chan but, honestly, I've bounced from plenty of Discord servers that are indistinguishable from 4chan. I think it's OK to recognize that at least some part of the non-4chan web is still very 4channy.
Discord is very new. I think the point of the post is the current internet has gotten worse. The web wasn't like /b/,its becoming like that though.
My introduction to the web progressed roughly with watching my dad use BBS -> playing Neopets and Runescape -> becoming very involved with Runescape forums -> running a Runescape forum (first introduction to moderating user-submitted content at the age of 10. Yeah...) -> getting involved with video game modding communities, which meant I was spending all my free time browsing forums, following every link, completely absorbed by everything the early web's computer game communities churned out.
My experience probably would've been very different if I hadn't been able to get around the parental controls my parents used, or if I had been interested in different hobbies with a more approachable web presence.
I've been nostalgic for the "old web" lately, but I'm also very, very grateful that I haven't clicked on an inconspicuous URL that turned out to be a jumpscare, virus, weird porn, or gore in quite a while.
EDIT: I don't want to imply that the Disturbing Web == Videogame Web; that just happened to be my experience.