Are we remembering the same Factbook? It had summary statistics for every country and some brief blurbs about their history, climate, economy, etc. Strictly speaking yeah it generated some legitimacy to publish a resource like this and I find it hard to believe the CIA can't scrape a few quarters together to keep it running, but most of it's value is sentimental.
Soft power includes positive perception. Every time someone learns that GPS is completely paid for by the American government and then freely available to the rest of the world, that shapes perception.
The Facebook being quoted by so many school kids worldwide was a cheap softening of how the world perceived the CIA and America. Now how valuable that is isn’t clear, but when something is that cheap it doesn’t take much to be a net gain.
Today's kids would never see it past the layer of AI. To them AI is the top level abstraction and that's it.
We have Hollywood and spy movies/series now.
Hollywood and spy movies/series predate the web.
What makes the CIA Factbook useful is it reframes learning about other countries.
Americans famously have near-zero knowledge of other countries. Nothing valuable was lost in this aspect. You need something new.
You completely misunderstood what everyone was talking about. The point is to make people in other countries do what we want them to do.
American diplomacy, foreign policy, spying, soft, and hard power etc is obviously primarily targeting non Americans here.
Thus like most things the CIA does this is targeting foreigners or foreign influence, though of course direct impact on Americans is a nice bonus. We don’t want young Americans looking up facts on a Chinese or Russian website.
I had something similar to this talking globe[1] when I was a kid and it was amazing for raising my geopolitical awareness. You tap on a country with the pen and it tells you the name and some facts about it. Even if I hadn't learned anything, I had fun pressing "Azerbaijan" over and over because 10-year-old me thought it was a funny spelling and pronunciation.
[1]https://www.walmart.com/ip/World-Globe-for-Kids-Interactive-...
You might be underestimating the reach, you've got schoolchildren around the world using it as it's usually the most convenient source you're allowed to cite for this data
As an anecdote example, I've never ever accessed said Factbook, but I've heard about it enough times to remember that such thing exists and that USA govt. is collecting a relatively objective fact list. So yeah, it was a tiny bit of soft power of sorts. It showed that USA cares about outside world, in some way at least.
PS: and I live in Eastern Europe, far far away from the USA.
I grew up outside the US. I have a distinct memory of using the Factbook for homework assignments and being told it is a reliable source of information. That shapes people's perceptions of the US and the CIA from a young age.