I am totally in agreement with the sentiment that infinite scrolling sucks. I just want pages back.
You couldn't add anything, other than forums, and posting there tended to be a solitary thing like current (anti?)social media, but it was more of a real life experience.
But I still think 99% of the problem with the internet is just that we spend all day on it. There's nobody to create any content about real life if everyone scrolls all day, and if you're too addicted, no content to find that inspires you do do anything in real life(There's amazing DIY videos, you can learn basically anything, but it only works if you actually then put down the screen and do it)
Thus, the infinite scroll is the only appropriate navigation mechanism.
Or present as an endless scroll, but have visible page break headers, containing sharable links, so it's semantically paged even if the UI has to be dirty icky endless scrolling.
https://www.invaluable.com/blog/chinese-painting-handscroll/
You read them horizontally, in a mode that indeed is quite similar to today's virtual scrolling.
So I guess, the alternative to infinite vertical scrolling is... infinite horizontal scrolling?