“I think the most depressing fact about humanity is that during the 2000s most of the world was handed essentially free access to the entirety of knowledge and that didn’t trigger a golden age.”
Hoel’s answer is that past geniuses got one-on-one tutoring from serious adults, and everyone else gets mass schooling. Population went up, education went up, barriers came down, and the supply of world-class minds did not follow. Free information was never the bottleneck. Attention from someone who knows more than you was, and the rich still buy it.