But that assumes that we've always lived in a "Truth" society where Truth was discoverable for a majority of content, and I'm not sure that was ever the case for more than like... 10% of the global population for more than a few decades. And it's not even clear to me that that was a net good for everyone involved in a practical sense.

A hundred years ago, even people in rich countries often had no simple way to verify the truth of anything. Even information local to them. Cut to 2000 and the scope of things you're expected to validate the truth of has expanded to wartime conditions in countries thousands of miles away, something that is often hard to discover the truth of in real time even if you're actively involved in the war there, and is often not fully discovered for decades or centuries after.

In my mind, optimistically, things are moving towards some people being more ok with just not having a hot take about something that they can't verify. Not to say people won't have unjustified opinions on things, but that folks will maybe revert to the sort of "that's happening over there, and maybe I don't need to know about it on a minute by minute basis" zone.

I agree with that. Truth has always been problematic and never had absolute certainty. Nonetheless, we had reasonable methods to increase the probabilities of what we know under certain conditions.

There was and always will be limits. However, we understood to some degree at least how to rationalize some manner of probabilities for truth. Locality of information, reputation, the amount of congruent data etc.

So I think we are passing from an era of difficult to truth to potentially and era of impossible truth. And yes, some things were already impossible to verify. However, it just simply becomes substantially more and at extremely low cost to manufacture confusion at enormous scale.