I think readability of HTML is something that people of a certain age just expect. I remember in the early days of the web just doing a “View Source” for interesting websites and learning a lot of really neat tricks to apply to my own websites.
The web of the 90s and early 2000s was just so accessible as a kid curious about how it all worked. You could cobble together a personal website on Geocities and learn by copy and pasting code you found on someone else's website that did something cool. It just promoted this really beautiful experimentation and cross pollination of ideas that is mostly lost now.