You've always had terrible borderline-porn romance novels at grocery stores and terrible pulp novels and the like. We just don't read terrible novels from 100 years ago; whatever we read from that era now has survived the test of time. The same cannot be said about anything released in the last couple years.
Grocery store softcore porn was still very expensive in time, money, and space. The amount of energy required to move a book around is monumental in comparison to how much energy it takes to move the same number of bits of information contained in the book. The speed at which just the information moves (in modern digital networks) is nearly instantaneous. The space the digital book carries is not measurable by the human senses.
It was nearly impossible for most people to afford to fill every waking moment with a book in front of them, bar a few addicts. Now there is a river of information actively fighting for your eyeballs at every moment. And how the meme-gene works, the most addictive types will rise as the victor.
These days I have this vague paranoia that most of what I'm watching, listening to, interacting with is just the product of some meat proxy somewhere trying to put some more half baked crap in front of my eyeballs.
I wish I had a portal to human curated, absolutely non-AI, non-clickbait BS like the very old internet (which still wasn't perfect). I think that dream is effectively dead now. But old books/movies/music are still good. Now I sound like an old grandpa reminiscing about the old days.
They do, and it's annoying that even apps for "real work" do the same thing by flashing notifications/tips in your face, advertising a new feature you don't want to use right now, or warning you that everything is about to break soon.