Just like websites dying out, I think people back then made them as passion projects they hoped would turn into something more (or not). I remember one I used in the early 2000s called Selida. It had this bug where it would crash randomly on save and I’d lose all of my work. I didn’t know any better and just kept using it. The end result is I had to retype my HTML so many times that it hammered it into my head until I was proficient :) This was a WYSIWYG with a code editor view (like Dreamweaver).