How different is SEO today compared to ~15 years ago?

About 15 years ago, I followed the old Webmaster World "26 steps to 15k per day" to generate affiliate marketing traffic and made some beer money sending people to Amazon and various commission junction sites. I had kids and they take up a bunch of time, something had to give so I gave up affiliate marketing.

My kids are teenagers and cloud computing is dirt cheap compared to what hosting cost years ago, so I'm dipping my toes again.

I have more programming skills today. I made a deep vertical niche website. I figured out how I can get users of my new site to generate a decent amount of keyword-targeting "thin content" on the site. I plant a few seeds and then I let the users do the rest. I tested it with my teenage kids, they seemed to get how to use the site.

I've got a few pages of thick content (1000 words plus) to supplement this thin content and act as "landing pages". I have about 15 more pages of this thick content planned, targeting keywords found with the google keyword tool.

I've also got a blog that I use to keep the front page fresh. I try to blog daily, searching news and youtube for fresh content related to my audience. I editorialize a bit on it to get upwards of 150-200 words per blog post. Blog posts don't target specific keywords, it's just freshness relating to the target audience. I blog about my thick content as I post it. I also plan to blog about the "thin content seeds" as I plant them.

Those blog posts get sent to my small social media presence. It's worth a couple clicks per day. I like to think it's my mom. :)

Questions:

1. Is there a replacement for the open directory project? Getting a listing on DMOZ was a license to generate traffic... in 2004.
2. Is content still king? Am I wasting my time writing 1000+ word articles about why you should consider performing X operation vs Y but having this discussion is dumb because Z? Do people use the internet to learn any more? Are users still looking for "their content"?
3. Google Analytics doesn't seem to track keywords like it used to. How do I determine what keywords are "hitting"? What is this "search console" thing?
4. How much SEO backlink value is there in social media? Is there a good social media subreddit?

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