Because we couldn't get anyone to take the internet seriously if it was just a bunch of anonymous pseudonyms trolling each other. And maybe that was a mistake.
Just look at Facebook. Users with real names sharing all kinds of inane schizo nonsense, extremism, building echo chambers without realizing it, becoming completely divorced from reality as perceived by the majority of people around them in meatspace, because they section themselves off in cyberspace.
Coming from all the pro-Internet and open web talk of the 2010s still rattling around in my brain, this felt like dunking my head in an ice bath. Painful but necessary.