I agree the 90s internet experience wasn't something really worth pining for. It's easy to forget that broadband wasn't, in most cases, consistently broad enough yet (and server response latency was often pretty poor), the software tech stack was still too immature and much of the presentation was still designed around dial-up constraints. While the experience of discovering exponentially more genuinely interesting content on forums and personal blogs was revelatory compared to Usenet, there's even more good content available today, it's just frustratingly buried in vast mountains of click-bait crap auto-generated to deceptively look like authentic content.

I think "peak web" was somewhere around 2010 to 2012 and even as late as 2015. I'm still able to mostly put together a fairly useful and minimally annoying daily experience but it does require increasingly more work to sustain. This includes finding, integrating, and, in some cases, writing userscripts and browser add-ons to variously fix and/or de-crapify the web. uBlock Origin (with lots of my own filter rules to hide various crap elements) is just the beginning. Just checking my Firefox ViolentMonkey and Stylus scripts, there are now four scripts just to fix Google (along with a layered set of my own regex-scripted redirects in the Redirector add-on which manipulate Google Search's URL parameters fix a bunch of things and enforce useful defaults).

* YouTube: The AdashimaaTube Stylus script makes YT usable and useful again (has >700k users)

* Reddit: OldReddit plus the essential Reddit Enhancement Suite along with defaulting the homepage to a carefully curated MultiReddit list of small, special-interest niche subs.

* For the rest of the web I have about 30 add-ons in Firefox (and that's after recently culling my add-on list down to what I consider the bare essentials). About a third of them fix things related to websites, a third address issues with Firefox itself, and a third add features to Firefox or specific sites (Amazon: (item price history, fix default sort), Steam Store: comparative pricing, Twitter: fix Twitter layout & defaults, Netflix: add Metacritic, IMDB and Rotten Tom. review scores, etc).

* Although it remains the 'least-bad' browser for user choice, privacy and personalization, the current product management of Firefox seems intent on destroying even this last refuge. I can't even use FF without the amazing Lepton userchrome that extensively fixes all the insane things FF's run-amuck designers keep doing to fuck up its interface. Essential: https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix. On top of that I have my own extensive fixes, adaptations and personalizations in UserChrome.css and User.JS. Lepton and my own scripts require an emergency intervention to maintain at least once every three months because they keep getting broken by new Firefox versions. Just the maintenance is getting bad enough that I'm about to switch to the latest long-term version of FF. Frankly, the changes, improvements and 'modernizations' FF has been making the last couple years seem about 90/10 irrelevant/useful. The community at FirefoxCSS is a godsend for crowd-sourcing how to keep fixing, patching and maintaining UserChrome (www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/).

* Lastly, since we're talking about tech overall, it's the same clusterfuck on Windows 10 and Android. Yes, I know Linux is better in many ways but it's a personal preference thing for me. Unlike the other non-linux option, Mac/iOS, at least Windows can still be variously "fixed" and otherwise made usable with sufficient effort and diligent hackery. Tools like Ditto (a sharable macro + multi-clipboard), 7TT, Start10, Groupy, AutoHideMouseCursor, Textify, AlwaysMouseWheel, ShareX, PowerToys, WinAeroTweaker, WinGetUI, a dozen free utility apps from NirSoft and the absolutely essential "Everything" (an incredible, lightning fast whole-system search). Together, these along with an extensive personal AHK script and a few dozen registry customizations (which I now have scripted for new installs) allow Windows 10 to be pretty okay. (Note: I'm not forgetting all the similar work I've had to do to hack, fix, de-ad-ify and de-crapify my television, Android-ish streaming sticks and nearly everything else marketed with the word "Smart". I'm just too tired to enumerate all of that too.)

Obviously, this amount of literal per-user work being required to actually experience a reasonable form of the "Better Future" we thought we were building is ridiculous. My whole life I've always believed in the ability of technology to broadly improve our lives. While this belief has proven (mostly) true, I never imagined we'd have to endure these kinds of trivial yet maddening functionality and usability regressions in routine daily activities. It's like a malevolent fairy tale genii granted our wishes for useful AI and routine spaceflight yet perversely doomed us to walk around with sandpaper in our underwear! Maybe I'm too idealistic but I just refuse to give-in, give-up and accept that our technological future is destined to be worse than the past - especially in such mundane ways - and for such trivially stupid reasons.