Those are all assumptions and memories from working during that time period - possibly wrong, would look up if you disagree. But if you don't, then my conclusion would be that staying flat during a period like that - when you could have grown and supported a deep, new, persuasive trend of literacy, fact-based reasoning and understanding, education and compromise - is a huge failure.
Most of those new internet users are in Asia and do not use English as their primary language. If you look at editor counts of other Wikipedia editions; Hindi https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/hi.wikipedia.org/contributing/... , Indonesian https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/id.wikipedia.org/contributing/... , Thai https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/th.wikipedia.org/contributing/... , Persian https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/fa.wikipedia.org/contributing/... kept growing after the English Wikipedia saturated.