I guess I didn't think of it that way. I was thinking more of the barrier for a regular user to get started. From what I remember, the wizard for a casual user wasn't that great, so knowing HTML was a necessity. But I could be wrong.
Many of the sites were made in something like Frontpage even. There were templates and site makers, but also most people kept the stuff super simple.
And just because it was more complex doesn't mean it wasn't important. It was the easiest thing to come along. Before that you had to set up a web server, buy a domain, etc...