I rather miss those early days. Web 1.0 is looked down on for its visual clutter (and definitely the hatred of image backgrounds and animated text was well-deserved), but Web 2.0 has just as much if not more clutter, and of a darker nature.
The whole web is backwards these days; users should’ve able to download themes for different kinds of content and the content itself should be barely human readable self-describing text with no layout instructions, only hints (like title and h1 and p)- leave it to the client to choose how to display.
Obviously it's a minority that do, but the potential itself has value I think.
I read that blog every day and the techniques and tooling (jquery/mootools/etc) absolutely shifted the thinking that birthed our "modern" react/vue style single page app.
This is like saying that Classical -> Baroque never happened because people still paint in a Classical style.
I have a daily need for both tags.