Opinion
What the screen borrowed
Online listings inherited the catalogue's item block almost intact. What they did not inherit is the thing that made a catalogue trustworthy: a fixed extent.
The item block came through the transition to screens almost unchanged. A picture, a name, a short description, a specification line and a price, bounded by a rule or a shadow, arranged in a grid: that is a catalogue row, and it is what nearly every listing page still shows. The unit of the printed catalogue turned out to be a genuinely good solution to a problem that did not change.
What carried over well
Comparison by alignment survived, and improved: a screen can sort and filter in ways a printed page cannot, which is a real gain for anyone choosing between many similar things. Specification tables survived. Item numbers survived, under other names. The convention of separating the persuasive sentence from the checkable fact survived, and remains the fastest way to judge whether a listing is being straight with you.
What did not
A printed catalogue has edges. It contains a specific number of items, and the reader can see how many by holding the book. That fixed extent is the source of a kind of trust that no listing page reproduces: the reader knows they have seen the range, knows nothing was reordered between one look and the next, and knows the page they are seeing is the page everyone else is seeing.
Endless scrolling removed the first of those, personalised ordering removed the second, and variable pricing and placement removed the third. None of that is a technical necessity; all of it is a choice, and the cost is paid in a reader's ability to feel that they have finished looking.
The running head problem
Print solved orientation with a running head and a page number. Screens frequently solve it with nothing at all, so a reader deep in a filtered list often cannot say what they are looking at, how they arrived, or how to get back to the same view tomorrow. Breadcrumbs and stable, shareable addresses are the direct descendants of the running head, and the pages that keep them are noticeably easier to use than the ones that do not.
An argument for the constraint
The instructive thing about the printed form is that its limits produced its virtues. Descriptions were short because the block was fixed, so they were edited. The range was finite because paper costs money, so it was chosen. Facts were tabulated because prose would not fit, so they were comparable. Remove the constraints and all three disciplines become optional, and mostly they have been declined.
None of this is an argument for going back to paper, which was slower, less searchable and out of date the day it was mailed. It is an argument for noticing which of the old constraints were doing useful work, and for reimposing those deliberately rather than waiting to rediscover them by accident.