I think you forgot MSFT being the super monoculture that hard blocked linux being installed on desktop machines with OEMS. IE6 being the scourge it was and pretty much the only option until firefox came out. How MSFT killed netscape & got an antitrust lawsuit over it. The entire encryption export fight & the clipper chip fight and so on. We look at the past with rose colored glasses.

I don't think people really looked at how long lasting their hardware was back then, it was more of a happy accident. We still 'disposed' of hardware with glee, more because of huge moore's law gains. I think a lot of people still use a lot of older hardware you're not aware of either. People use cars from the early 2000s still. People using cars from the 70s wasn't much of a thing in the 90s and american manufacturers were far less reliable.