The common theme was creators who didn’t monetize.
That’s the old web.
Now the new web has a lot of nice stuff but it’s under a paywall or an ad wall. That paywall / ad wall is like a fly in a soup, it ruins the whole dish. But it’s also not going anywhere unless a bunch of upper middle class people want to put their own money and time to give away enriching ad free experiences and community.
Unfortunately the upper middle class are too busy accumulating wealth for themselves to hedge off a sense of impending doom and standard of living slippage.
I am in that trap myself. I am doing work that I like, at a pay that I like but "something" has been missing for a long time. Two decades ago, back in my grad school days, I used to have a blog and was part of communities like livejournal. Now my blog is replaced with a blank page because I have nothing to share with my friends about my daily life.
For instance, in a lot of threads on some new technology or idea, one of the top comments is "I'm amazed by the negativity here on HN. This is a cool <thing> and even though it's not perfect we should appreciate the effort the author has put in" - where the other toplevel comments are legitimate technical criticism (usually in a polite manner, no less).
I've seen this same comment, in various flavors, at the top of dozens of HN thread in the past couple of years.
Some of these people are being genuine, but others are literally just engaging in amigdala-hijacking because they want to shut down criticism of something they like, and that contributes to the "everything that isn't gushing positivity is negative" effect that you're seeing.