My introduction to the web was, I'd say, about a year earlier - and I don't miss it at all.
Sure, it was nascent and full of promise. But that's mostly what it was - promise. Yes, there were all these offbeat websites you could find in the Yahoo directory, but that was not much different to aimlessly scrolling (or, fine, clicking on HN stories).
When I was studying CS one didn't have a hope in hell of building anything of substance independently, because Every.Single.Little.Thing had to be built from scratch - in C or C++ at best. And you'd better have enjoyed those late nights at the lab, it's not like you had anywhere to turn to at 1am when your code is buggy...
The ability to just build is, I feel, far more democratized today - and there's still a long way to go. So to me, the web is still very new, and still full of promise.
The Internet was also incredibly elitist back then. In 1998 only 17% of people in the developed world had access to it. Globally, that number was 3%...You could meet anyone in the world! So long as they were rich.
Today these corresponding numbers are 90% and 63% - I think it's better that way. Certainly, that has been the promise, hasn't it?
And walled gardens? AOL wanted to own the Internet point blank...
I think if anything, our generation was dumb the way all people are dumb in the face of something new. I think our kids would look back at the time we wasted on FB and Twitter and think - "You morons. You spent hours scrolling reading random people's posts? Were you THAT bored?"
Besides, we ARE, right now, part of something very new and incredibly big. Anyone can play with transformer models, with about the same relative ease and
accessibility as you could with the Internet 25 years ago. (Which is to say - as a user, easy enough. As a builder, requiring a healthy dose of determination.)
I think of technology as, like, a tidal force, that just sweeps everyone. It does good and bad. It creates and destroys. Pining for any moment in time is like pinpointing a moment in a stochastic process...it was only ever just a moment in flux.