One issue there was that human-curated directories are everywhere. Hacker News is one. Reddit is another. And during the Yahoo times, directories were made everywhere and all over the place. Which one is authoritative? There's too much of them out there.

That said, in NL a lot of people's home pages for a long time was set to startpagina.nl, which was just that, a cool directory of websites that you could submit to the website. It seems to exist still, too.