I'm a cloud engineer today with about a decade of experience. I mainly build and maintain K8s clusters for those who've made the unusual choice of going with EKS.

That being said, I did not understand until I was 17 that you could...just open a browser...and the internet was on.

As AOL rolled out broadband to its previously dial-up customer base, they did not want to confuse their very technically unskilled customers. So just like dialup, where a PPP connection has to be made initially, they preserved the concept in broadband. You still had to click all of the buttons as if you were signing into AOL. This also had the advantage of keeping people on the AOL browser.