What's "a proper job"? Dotsya doesn't understand this concept.
People give up too easily. If you aren't prepared to spend 100+ hours a week working for months on end, then you don't want it badly enough.
I remember the internet in the 90s and quite frankly, there was nothing special about what people were doing back then. In fact, it was more annoying trying to figure out how to market to people. Those long time black hatters have forgotten how frustrating it was before mobile phones and social networks, even though it was easier to rank pages from the get go.
Not so many people even had an internet connection. How about the fact that you had to design your own website with HTML and/or CSS/PHP? I never liked how everything looked back then, especially with those poor quality gifs and jpegs.
Nowadays you can get millions of people to see your posts at once and if you know what you are doing, you will always get traffic.
I can set up a Weebly store site in 30 minutes that looks better than what big companies had in the mid 00s. What exactly is the problem? Making money online didn't become more difficult - people just got lazier (and spoiled).