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On the other side we were told that those colorful gradients that will be the fad of the 20s are cheap and we were scolded by professional designers for using them.

Not that we had CSS gradients, we were using gifs or jpegs.

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I don't understand. I'm interested what this means.

We’d generate a 18x1 GIF with a gradient color change (or from a solid color to a transparent color) and stretched that out over however pixels we wanted to create a gradient-like effect. e.g

Gradients look boss.

Gradients as decoration look boss today. They looked cheap 30 to at least 20 years ago. Then they were forgotten and that made their return possible. They'll become unfashionable again. It's an eternal cycle.

Windows 98/ME and the Office versions of the same time are often blamed for making gradients seem boring and uncool. (Windows put a Gradient in every title bar and Office over-used them in all sort of other ways.) Microsoft was definitely an interesting contributor to both the fad at the time and the "gradients are boring" rejection a few years later because they seemed boring and uptight like an Office program.

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