Much as an argument confusing World War II Germany with the Holy Roman Empire might be called 'well-said.' You're confusing the early web era with the dot-com boost/bust period.

The early web were the era of dozens, perhaps hundreds of competing web browsers which were made possible by simple, well-engineered web standards. Pages were served statically, or with CGI scripts. You had a whole swarm of generic spiders, crawlers, and bots which automated things on the web for you. Anyone could write a web browser, so many people did.

The dot-com boom/bust had companies doubling in size every few months, people who could barely code HTML making 6-figure salaries, Netscape imploding, early JavaScript (which, at the time, looked like a high schooler's attempt at a programming language), and web standards with every conceivable ill-thought-out idea grafted in.

If one of the first programs you ever wrote was a scraper for an ASPX site, you never saw the elegance of the early days. ASPX came out not just after HTML3, but after HTML4.