Here is a great article from the Atlantic titled The Internet Is Rotting. It describes the problem of link rot and how our new digital archiving is much less resilient and accessible than when we had paper bound books in libraries. And it also does a good job of describing how we got to where we are – how the Internet wasn’t planned to be what it has become.
I’m linking directly to it in that link above and this post will itself be a test of whether an article about link rot will itself be a victim of link rot!