On the other hand, I feel like nostalgia blinds us to the fact that tech has always had a commercial side. The only reason the internet became accessible to people outside government and academia in the early 90s was because commercial ISPs came onto the scene. The web became a lot more useful when for-profit companies like Google started indexing it. The computers we used to access the internet were only affordable because of decades of Moore's law driven by the semiconductor, home computing, and video games industries. I don't think the thing we're nostalgic for could have existed without the profit motive.
We also shouldn't take for granted the amount of creativity enabled by modern platforms. We might be nostalgic for hobbyists making their own websites and chatting on IRC. But today we have orders of magnitude more hobbyists creating videos on YouTube and collaborating on Discord. Platforms like Patreon make it possible for people to turn their hobby into a career by connecting directly with their audience. Every aspiring game developer can make a video game in Unity and publish it on Steam. I can choose any topic I want to learn about and watch free lectures from experts at MIT and Stanford, or find high quality videos made by the most interested and dedicated amateurs. None of this existed 20 years ago.