Hence the longing for the times when this was not yet the case, and the quest for places that still maintain these qualities. (These places are often intentionally hard to find from outside; see the dead forest hypothesis.)
Political correctness eventually tainted the internet as then if someone's values were hurt, drama would roll around only fuelling the troll further. This later led to gatekeeping and entitlement; Tumblr as example.
The internet has now made everyone so sensitive and now most want to broadcast their feels upon social media or whatever, you end up with elitism of groups and communities who think they know best.
First of all, there wasn't much in the way of technical hurdles when it came to myspace or geocities, so I don't buy your premise at all. I was LARPing as a video game reviewer at 10 years old in 1995 with my awful <blink> tags/tiled backgrounds/table layouts. I was a dumb kid and still managed to figure it out. So did approximately one squillion of other people.
Secondly, the same tired, obnoxious comment about privilege and technology can be trotted out and applied to the early web, early facebook, early usenet, early IRC, early LLMs, early crypto. What does this comment do to advance the discussion in any meaningful way?
Even if some curious minds got past the stigma, they still had to have an actual reason to go online which for many people just didn't exist until e-commerce and social networks became a thing. And then they had to learn how to use computers. This still wasn't gatekeeping because literally anyone could put in a minimal effort and go online, but effort is the key word here.
It became truly effortless with smartphones and touch screens, but this also reduced interaction to likes and tweets, and users became content consumers to be exploited with ads. This is where we are today.
I lived in rural MI and neither of my parents had a 4 year degree. I wasn't the kid of someone at MIT or in the Valley. We weren't an impoverished family, but we were somewhere between middle and lower-middle class. We were by far some of the lowest people on the web totem pole, socio-economically speaking, but access wasn't out of the question for people who didn't come from a lot of financial/educational privilege.