It's happened over and over and over.
I know it's fashionable to hate Google nowadays but come on.
On top of that, without the web becoming popular, there wouldn’t have been the investment in fast home internet or fast cellular data.
Of course, the past is always rosy, especially when you were young, and new things are always exciting and lose their novelty when you get used to them, but I found the internet much more interesting back then.
It took literally hours to download a five minute QuickTime video clip. Streaming audio kind of worked but streaming video with RealVideo was painful.
Surprisingly enough, graphical remote access to a remote Windows computer actually worked decently well over dialup with PCAnywhere.
I think I first had high speed internet around 2002 via FreeDSL and when that went kaput, DirecTV owned a company called Telestream that offered DSL service.
Sadly, just turning down the bandwidth doesn't turn back time - I've experienced that first hand when somebody killed the box connecting the building to the ISP and I had to fall back on mobile... it was like playing Tetris on level 99 and then being thrown back to level 01.
A pretty good web directory at the time was cheap, about $12 million a year for editors, but Google had 10+ years where it did better with unsupervised algorithms, so nobody spent any time on integrating human curators.