Well first you have to remember the era that birthed the Golden Age. This was the dawn of the genre, what's cliche now wasn't necessarily cliche then. In fact, things that are cliche now are that way BECAUSE they're popular and everybody uses them as a result. The cost of the books was dirt cheap as well, 5 or 15 cents. Besides magazines and books the only other real mass media were Film and Radio at that time as well, though TV was on the horizon.
Another reason it's called the Golden Age is because there was more than just Superhero comics, there were War, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi and a host of other genres as well, they were just all gutted and cancelled at the end of the Golden Age. The only comics that survived the end were Super-hero ones, that was because they were seen as the least objectionable, and even then the publishers set up the Comics Code Authority to act as a regulatory body. They did that themselves so that the government wouldn't of course, and it's no longer active today.
Before the end of the Golden Age of Comic Books comics were diverse in genre and in what was allowed, murder, character death, drugs, all that sort of gritty realism thing was possible then and afterwards it was gone until the late 90s early 2000s. That is why you have so much Silver Age silliness during the Silver Age because the writers weren't allowed to write anything else.
This all doesn't necessarily mean that Golden Age comics are good by modern standards or that they're bad, they're different and should be judged with an awareness of the time that they came from.
