Just to ensure you don't gaslight yourself - I did live through that era and I worked on and supported a niche community (a MUD) where we did a lot of work encouraging marketing and discoverability through MUD forums as well as making sure our page was accurately and minimally keyword tagged and highly available for indexers.

In the time since that era search engines have transformed into platforms themselves that do engage in more parasitic behavior but it's important not to assume that the way it is now is how it always was - that's a rather defeatist path to walk down where you ignore awareness of the fact that there can be a highly profitable non-enshittified search engine that supports, rather than destroys, the ecosystem it benefits from.

It was better and, if we're diligent, it can be better again.