And two of the examples you brought up are social media focused, with one also being heavily focused on content discovery.
And the places you did find was very slow with new content being added and limited because as I said you could mostly only get the juicy stuff through piracy (as most things was still heavily reliant on offline distribution).
That was not the old internet but already the current one.
Sure, if you never leave FB or Reddit, you're not going to see a ton of diversity. But it's still all there if you can get more than a page into search results, or put in literally the exact same level of effort you used to have to put in when AltaVista and Lycos were out giving horrendous search results.
Even on Reddit, if you spend your time on what used to be the defaults versus finding the niche subs, you're going to have a vastly different understanding of forest/wasteland.
They all exhibit a tremendous level of "likethink" bubbling, I find everyone on a given platform to be more or less the same spewing the same crap over and over again.
Contrast Geocities, where you could find everyone and everything imaginable, short of straight up illegal stuff.
The internet back then was a forest into which you couldn't really see, you just went dumpster diving and it was an adventure.
Today's internet is barren, with most content centered around Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Youtube, and various commercial propaganda campaign sites known colloquially as journalism. That is a fucking desert, a wasteland.