I dont think your analogy to rosy retrospection applies here.
The issues we have with todays social media are the same issues IRC, usenet and other primordial internet social tools have suffered from in the past at scale. People abandoned those for what they thought was better. They went on to myspace and eventually they gave up myspace and went on to facebook and twitter because they thought these would be even better. And they were for a while. Facebook was really cool when people limited to sharing meal and travel photos with friends and family. Twitter was cool when limited to sharing fun short stories or updates.
Then gradually the noisy plebe invaded. The drunken pub types debating angry politics, pseudo intellectuals, wannabe thought leaders, cheap scammers and sleazy politicians.
And instead of banning or pushing them towards network ghettos, algorithms where made to amplify specifically their voice, in order to bait all the decent people into engaging with platforms even more. These algorithms developed habits in us that turned everyone into a little bit of the above.
We tried this. Doesn't work. We need to iterate what worked. MySpace did. I fail to understand why facebook and twitter didnt put more thought into how to monetise the platform in better ways. Was it lack of imagination or the lack of people skills of their founders? Anger and politics are not the only things that drive sales and profits. Social networks are a reflection of our society and in a society you tend to marginalise the angry violent mobs that try to capture your attention and suck your energy, and instead you go where you can do your shopping, eating, reading, traveling, entertainment consuming safely and peacefully. Social networks can monetise on that.
Instead they made us fight each other.