If you live in the Midwest, that "local" university library can easily be 4+ hours away.

Writing the author is a fine idea and could lead to some great correspondence. It could also be a huge time sink if, like me, you look at a few dozen papers on the topic only to find one or two are really applicable.

To be fair about this, the time window in which a large proportion of papers were online but gated was about a decade (depending on field, obviously).

Was this worse than before? The option of going to a suitable library did not suddenly vanish. The web just let you know what was there.