Talk about rose-colored glasses and "the good ol' days". All I can remember are the animated gifs flash and spinning around on people's pages...
Print designers were adapting to the web and there was a tremendous amount of technique, experience and hard work in that first batch.
Then the dictatorship of the sameness started, and we somehow ended in a world where everything kinda looks the same but is slightly different in slightly broken ways. Creativity be damned, but also other things like performance, accessibility and user-centricity are now secondary to following fashions.
I met so many cool people in real life I never would have other wise it would be hard to even count.