I think the word you're looking for is "personality". Sure half the sites were blinding and had background music and blinking crap and were pretty terrible, but it perfectly reflected the person that built it, however shoddily.

Now, everything is sterilized. Run through a million filters to be picture-perfect, work on everything beautifully, etc. This is great for the bulk of the web (businesses and web apps and what-not), but personal websites disappearing was a _huge_ blow to the personality of the internet. Heck, MySpace pages were a disaster, letting users run arbitrary HTML and CSS everywhere, and when Facebook came along everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief that _finally_ we'd be free of those horrendous MySpace pages.

Now, looking back, I miss the crap out of those pages. I also ditched social media entirely but I consider everything I just mentioned as playing a large role in that. No charm, no personality. Rigid. Walled gardens. It's like a microcosm of the state of technology in 2019.

And I mentioned personal sites disappearing, and I still stand by it - yes, of course there are blogs and what-not, but they're not the same. They're hosted, fast, efficient, and typically use approved themes. If you want to get down and dirty and actually make your own site, it'd be looked at as a gigantic waste of time. Technology has come too far for it to be practical to build a fancy site out of pure flat HTML files that looks like the worst 90s sites. Why do that, when you could just have an out-of-the-box Wordpress or Tumblr site?

Plus, no one would visit it anyway. If it's not spammed or marketing, no one's visiting anything these days. It's just too saturated.

The average internet user visits a tiny fraction of the number of websites they used to. Typically, aggregators. Reddit and Facebook and whatever. Worse yet, aggregators that pull in only things they agree with, shared by people they agree with. And that is their version of the internet, and not to mention, the world. No dissenting opinions, nothing original. It's depressing and I hate it.

I grew up learning to build websites from copying source code into Notepad and running it locally. It was a hot mess, but so much fun and super rewarding. The 90s web, even early 2000s until ~2006 or so (when I personally consider it went "too mainstream" to put on my hipster hat, and everyone was suddenly on it), I miss it all.

Sorry for the rant but this all hits close to home and, as a web developer who got started in the mid-90s, I'm subjected to the "modern web" for many hours a day, and I'd give anything to see it regress.