But yes, good designs are not flashy, e.g. I love the design of Astro Starlight ( https://starlight.astro.build/), a starter kit for documentation pages.
So I also took inspiration from "simple designs" for my personal site: https://bryanhogan.com/
Why?
We can have bare, simple sites while still making them accessible.
Generally speaking though, I do think trying to paint 90s websites as some sort of utopian ideal of function and design is purely an exercise in nostalgia and nothing else. It is entirely possible to make fast, responsive, accessible, well-designed rich websites today, all without writing a word of JavaScript (not that including JS by itself is bad or anything). Do not mistake anti-user functions like heavy weight analytics and user tracking libraries, or poorly optimized and ill-architected code bundles as the current "state of the art".