I believe this changed in the early 2000s. The dot-com crash reset Silicon Valley. And the Enron scandal reduced corporate America's pull on it. (Steve Jobs wasn't an icon when business casual began taking its hold.)
[1] https://high-tech-guide.com/article/how-did-steve-jobs-help-...
Around the time you say, casual Fridays came in. The funny thing is the CEO got annoyed at one point because a lot of the engineers felt they need to underdress relative to the business people who were now dressing business casual on Fridays and increasingly most days.
I'd say that over the next couple decades, things got more and more casual to the point where ties, much less suits, are pretty uncommon in settings where not wearing one would have seemed out of place 25 years or so ago.
At trade shows, as I recall, at some point in the 90s, IBM booth staff showed up at one big show wearing branded polo shirts rather than suits. At which point, most everyone else went: If IBM isn't wearing suits, I guess we don't need to.
The amount of money it would take for me to put up with such ancient, sexist and conformist bullshit is hard to imagine.
I think that banks in Manhattan may still have shirt-and-tie for engineers.
I quickly realized I didn't mind it at all once I found correctly fitting shirts. If you consider a tie to be too constricting, you have the wrong shirt.
Even as borderline OCD (self diagnosed, so likely wrong), I never found particular clothes to be a hinderance to me typing (I'm a software dev), and I'm one of those guys that can't stand tags in t-shirts and rip them out. I think 90% of the angst over "comfortable" clothes is a learned cultural thing, and overblown. IMO.
How will the people around you react to you using a suit? If it's badly, you are as much forced to wear a certain kind of clothes as the GP was.
Anyway, just because there is a dressing code, it doesn't mean that the culture normally associated with it dominates. Those are two different things, where one is a huge problem, and the other mostly irrelevant. It's always better if you react to problems that are rally there, instead of noisy proxies.
A bunch of suiting trends come from this. Suit jacket with ruined pants? Now it's a blazer, so, casual wear. Handmedown worn 3-button suit that you're wearing casually at college, with the top button pretty much permanently unbuttoned? You've just invented the 2-roll-3 jacket style. And so on.
We've replaced this behavior with simply having all our clothes be disposable-cheap. Mending a hole and adding patches to keep wearing something's not really worth it when it cost $20 to begin with.
To defend myself a bit, though, most conversations I see around this topic are referring to comfort.
Different people can value these rules in different amounts, and to your point, I didn't value "what I'm wearing" as much as some other people do, so I get you.
Plop me in a pair of shorts with a t-shirt or better, a hoodie and I feel great.
And actually, some things have gotten worse. I think requirements for natural light used to be much stricter in older buildings (that's where you get all those u-shaped ones) so you were more likely to be near a window, for instance.
The cube farm was hated at the time, but things only ever get worse if you work in an office.
Scott Adams was blasting open concept offices before it was cool to blast them.
When I entered the workplace in 2003 I was lucky to get a peg for my coat, had to hot-desk during the day - there were 6 people on shift but only 4 computers. You'd go out to fix a printer or something and when you came back to base someone's taken your place
The Dilbert world of the time had cubicles, it was glorious. 3 years later the IT crowd had an entire room with just 2 people in, with their own phones, computers, desks etc.
Now of course I'm in a far more senior position and no longer deal with printers (literally have a high-viz saying "We don't do printers"). If I went into the office I'd still have to hot desk, although only on a per-day basis.
All of the sysadmins worked from one room, with a "datacenter" in the room next door. Imagine a single room, with desks lined up around the walls. No cubicles, and barely enough room for a keyboard/mouse/monitor and room for a soda or coffee. Crappy chairs too. Since I was the FNG, I got the desk in the back corner underneath the A/C duct. So I was perpetually frozen.
No one looks at each other since our desks faced the walls. The walls between our room and the "datacenter" had no soundproofing, so whenever I spun up the Sun gear (T2 cpus) the noise was like a helicopter taking off. Even over the A/C blasting down on me, I would hear these servers when I did a reboot.
I think the average salary at the time was around $70K or so, and there were 9 of us crammed into that crappy little room. So roughly $1M in compensation, but they couldn't find a real spot for us to work. Screw that place...
They weren't so loud, but those older ones, yeah I remember them.