Yes there was. Go to archive.org and check for yourself.
> The commercial internet is a trillion times bigger than anything that came before and services billions of users around the world, many for free, paid for by ads.
Bigger doesn't mean better. The web is now flooded with malicious and manipulative content. The ads pay for that content, while taxpayers and consumers pay for the infrastructure that actually makes the Internet possible. Ads pay to keep the web centralized, they don't pay for what makes the web possible.
> This is a tired old myth that everything was somehow better in the good old days but that's all it is.
There is indeed, but notice that I did not say that "everything was somehow better in the good old days". I made a very specific comment about a very specific topic. My comment: there was plenty of quality content on the web before ads arrived. Ads made the web worse. Argue against this if you like, but not about things I did not claim.