It was a fairly limited subset of people who experienced any of this anyway. I made adulthood in the 90s and barely knew the Internet existed. My parents didn't get a computer with a modem until my senior year of high school and it was in the kitchen, shared with everyone else in the family, and couldn't be used online at the same time anyone was using the phone since it used the same line. It took six hours to download a single 400 x 400 pixel porn image.

On the other hand, when high speed connections separate from the phone line became a thing and vBulletin and phpBB and what not proliferated and there were a whole lot of still small but at least somewhat widely used and representative places to socialize online without corporate ad giants tracking your every move, for a few shining years, that was pretty nice. Maybe 1999 to 2005 or so. It was a pretty weird moment we'll never get again when I could meet multiple primetime television actresses on Internet dating sites, when any earlier, they wouldn't have been online at all, and any later, they'd have professional social media managers and would get inundated with so much spam they couldn't sift through it even if they wanted to.

For a very, very brief time, the Internet was reasonably widespread and used but also still kind of authentic and not completely poisoned by fully-automated crime and ad companies.