No it wasn't. It was the norm among an ingroup of technically savy young people who, on HN, always confuse themselves with the average user at the time. A normal guy two decades ago was as the other commenter above points out, accessing the internet through a bunch of apps provided by their ISP (it's where the name comes from) a sort of vertically integrated company town, likely completely reliant on proprietary software that was so monopolistic, like IE, it sucked completely. When was browser choice better, then or now?
If you're an average user, not an average hacker in 2025 you have significantly more ways to avoid "big corpo" than you did back then. You weren't on IRC as a normie in 2005, you were on AIM and ICQ, also AOL owned of course. The norm, as in for a normal person, was to engage with the web and the world of computing to two, maybe three mega-companies, they weren't torrenting, ripping and re-encoding media.