As you say, the early web came close to this ideal. What happened was almost entirely political and social, namely censorship, and copyright, and DMCA takedowns, etc (only occasionally would a "webmaster" die, or would a system fall into disrepair). Freenet/anonymity (and the early web had the appearance of anonymity), is one approach to prevent pointer-breakage by simply making the censorship impractical. Another would simply be to accept that the web should be an append-only distributed database like Bitcoin's blockchain or like a de-duplicating filesystem in which additions depend on prior content, making censorship all or nothing (and hopefully we wouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater). Bittorrent is somewhere between - anonymity through numbers and a high-availability through independent mirroring (without interdependence between torrents, discouraging censorship).