I don't think we have to worry about "vast wasteland of garbage". Actually, I think that's the wrong moral orientation to take towards this sort of thing entirely.

Apparently one of the early neocities sites is exactly the kind of garbage that used to get made on Geocities: an adolescent fan site for a cartoon. But here's the thing: I made a freaking Pokemon site when I was in second grade or something. It was godawful, but it went up on Tripod and fed my interest in computers. And I sure as hell spent a lot of time at that age reading similar sites to find game cheat-codes.

And nowadays we have commenting and threading engines to let us make sites interactive.

The real internet was always a living embodiment of both Sturgeon's Law and the Long Tail phenomenon. Not every site has to appeal to everyone, but practically everyone can find a site they like.

So this is going to result in a huge amount of brilliant, fun utter crap.