Google has sucked for a long time. We have the wayback machine anyway.
I wasn’t even aware they were doing that. Did they share that backup with the public? I guess it makes sense to stop. The internet isn’t something special created by passionate people any more. It’s a bajillion meaningless social media posts, AI generated articles, news posts, propaganda, and SEO spam. I can see value in keeping the old Internet archives, and stuff like Wikipedia, but most of the internet is quite worthless these days outside of AI scraping and privacy intrusion.
You could take any url you had from like a bookmark or something and put it in to the Google search bar with “cache:” before the “http” part and it would show you a cached version of the page. It was occasionally handy for a while, but yes the internet archive covers a lot of the same ground these days.