Reminds me of early 2000s JS scene, in fact. Anything described as "DHTML" was a horrid hack. Glad to see Lemmings still works, though, at least in Firefox dev edition. https://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/
It was an incredible era that brought amazing aliveness to the internet. Most of it was pretty simple & direct, would be more intelligible to folks today than today would be intelligible & legible to folks from them.
This behavior is bad & deserves censure. The hacker spirit is free to be critical, but in ways that expand comprehension & understanding. To classify a whole era as a "horrible hack" is injurous to the hacker spirit.