It is not the past. There are two mutually exclusive views of the web. As a set of protocols set to allow individual humans to share information about things they love and the web as a set of protocols to make a living.
Profit motivated web presences want views, they want attention, they need nine 9s uptime, need to be able to do monetary transactions absolutely securely, and they want to be an application not a document. They live and die on the eternal wave of walled garden's recommendation engines because that's the network effect and that's where money flows. It doesn't matter if this means extremely high barriers to entry because money solves everything. It means JS VM applications and constant churn in standards. Web components, HTML without HTML, is one aspect of this.
Individuals' websites are freeform presentations about the things that person is interested in. They are the backyard gardens of the mind and the most important thing is lowering the friction from thought to posting. There's no need to get tons of traffic instantly (or ever), they're mostly time insensitive. They're documents. They're stable. They're actually HTML.
The big corporate browsers, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari are browsers designed for the corporate money web and they are becoming absolutely useless for actual web surfing. Pale Moon, and other browsers, are still focused on being browers. This isn't the past, it's the point.