Whose problem is this, anyway?
If you're searching for a particular product you'll type a description of what you want into your search engine of choice and get links that probably closely match what it is you wanted to find. You're certainly not going to get a "Page not found" page for the simple reason that the search engine (okay, I'll say it, Google) is only giving you results that actually exist. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the vast majority of web users never encounter linkrot, or are even familiar with the term.
It seems to me that it's also a good guess that relatively few people today have any reason, at least after the passage of enough time for a page to disappear, to try to return to a page they once saw, or bookmarked, in order to view it again. In a culture addicted to the new, and with so many possible pages that might be clicked into, I doubt that linkrot is an issue for anyone other than academics whose work entails reviewing materials they've encountered. Linkrot is a real problem, but it's a niche problem. It just happens that the niche that's distressed by it is also the niche that writes about these things.
Go to: Even back then ..., or
Go to: There's no chance that I'll find them all, or
Go to: Sometimes the tie-in is obvious, or
Go to: It was thirty years ago today