When the least expensive computer you could get was almost $5,000 and Internet access cost $5 per hour (both inflation adjusted), web users were mostly limited to academics and children of the 1%.

As the price of Internet access decreased so did the average socioeconomic status of users, and so building tools that made content easy to create and easy to consume suddenly became profitable. There simply is no alternate timeline where the web could have stayed the way it was, except perhaps one with a very abrupt ending to Moore's Law.