I'm not really convinced its gone. Its small. It was small 20+ years ago too though. I think the problem now is its hard to find the web where before that was all that was.
Oh, it's not gone, but as you say it's small and getting smaller. About half of my regular haunts (the ones that still exist, anyway) have withdrawn from the public web in the last couple of years and gone behind login walls in order to protect against crawlers. That's why I suspect this is the direction things are going to go.
