Yes. Granted more people were on dial-up, but while the
promise of an AJAXier web was one that felt faster, the effect
in practice has been one that feels slower, if anything. There was a brief golden age in which, if one had broadband, the web was
very fast using entirely static or server-rendered pages, which are considered in modern dev folklore (hilariously, to those who've seen both at work) to be slow. [EDIT] just the server rendering is considered slow or old-fashioned or somehow inefficient, I should clarify—I don't think anyone's nutty enough to think static pages are slow.
Also images were much, much smaller, both in terms of pixels and amount of compression applied, using large images that weren't content was heavily discouraged, and no-one used auto playing videos. To the extent that sins against bandwidth were committed it was mostly with Flash, which we all complained about and which is now reviled, but which was in fact generally way less abusive, confusing, and performance-destroying, than what gets done now in the name of "modern UX". Pages were much smaller, devs were much more sensitive to markup bloat. The worst we had on that front were WYSYWG-made pages (Frontpage, for example) but they've got nothing on the kind of attribute bloat and huge JS payloads one sees now (and the JS in particular can keep on allocating memory after its text is loaded into memory then parsed into even more memory, with predictable results on resource use and page load times)