There are a lot of small websites on the Internet: Interesting websites, beautiful websites, unique websites.
Unfortunately they are incredibly hard to find. You cannot find them on Google or Reddit, and while you can stumble onto them with my search engine, it is not in a very directed fashion.
It is an unfortunate state of affairs. Even if you do not particularly care for becoming the next big thing, it’s still discouraging to put work into a website and get next to no traffic beyond the usual bots.
password protection means you’ll have 0 visitors. it’s better to do proof-of-work instead. which means, the visitor’s computer solves some cryptographic puzzle to prove that it has spent energy and therefore money to visit the website. that makes scraping millions or billions of websites practically too expensive to do, while if you only visit a single website, it’s still reasonably cheap to do.
The password pages still have visitors. They just have to know the password.