I first listened to a podcast about link rot a little over a year ago: here. I've been thinking of it ever since. Perma.cc and the Internet Archive are good solutions for this (one being more of a solution for academics and organizations, and the other being a lot more all encompassing), but I feel that there is still a barrier for the average joe schmo to access these archived pages.
I was reading this substack about making some sort of extension that flipps it all around; make an extension to allow showing archived pages instead of their live ones. You can also add a slider (kinda like on Google Maps) to show snapshots of different dates.
I really like this idea for an extension, but feel that this can be tweaked a little bit and better focused to have broader adoption/user interest.
The error that Tom describes in his article is a typical DNS error saying that the website/url is no longer active. What if, we catch that error and either automatically redirect to the wayback machine snapshot, or add a little button at the top of that screen prompting the user to view the archived page?
It would also be really useful to show the user that they are seeing an archived page, with a dismissible banner at the top of the page or in the URL. Also, another useful feature, to compare edits of previous pages to the current one. I can see uses for this like showing the TOS changes for a website or different products that used to be displayed no longer there. This could also help with pricing of items (showing historical ones (although using a different browser extension like Honey would probably be a better time)).