I think the bigger gripe (and summary of your comment) is the following: books and the internet present information in a completely different way. A book is by

I think the bigger gripe (and summary of your comment) is the following: books and the internet present information in a completely different way. A book is by definition an end-to-end, self-contained experience. Even on highly-specific scientific topics, try to find one that doesn't bookend with context. The internet has evolved into a place where it's normal to create an extremely specific piece of content without context. After all, that's what linking is for ("Or they could always go read Wikipedia!" Ha). Moreover, I would argue that the expert context that's necessary for ideal grokking in fact doesn't exist. On a information-wide scale, no one creates just context for other things: Khan Academy provides it by building end-to-end learning experiences, and blog posts create it in an extremely limited and piecemeal manner (we've all been fortunate to read one of those "Eureka!" expert blog summaries). Indeed, it may not even be possible for such content to self-generate without external impetus. Where do shallow articles come from? Lay-persons (for lack of a better term) researching and writing for other lay-people (minimal time investment, maximum audience = $$). Where do hyper-specific articles come from? Trained-persons writing for other trained-people (maximum time investment, minimum audience = $grant$). Does anyone have a motive for where and why "trained-persons writing for lay-people" (e.g. deGrasse Tyson or Sagan: maximum time investment, quasi-maximum audience) would be created? Aside from altruism and digitized introductory academia? If you want to find a tragedy of the internet, it's the fact that it never evolved a systematic context-creation process. And so we don't have any. There may have been proposals in the original design of hyperlinking, and there were the 90s/00s "curated human indices of links". However, the "good enough" of modern search engines seems to have precluded the time investment necessary.