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I don't think phone calls makes huge difference for current situation. Flat rate calling plan only for night was available in 90s (but yeah it's for nerds so your point is vaild). ADSL were widely available in about 2001-2006. FTTH is now virtually available everywhere (except some condos with fragile "free" internet).

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The timing is huge. There was a period time from the late 80s to I'd say Win98 when computers became affordable, they were useable by laypeople, but they still weren't easy yet. You still had to learn about some of the underlying ideas to do anything useful. By 2001 user-focused OSes had gotten figured out to the point where they mostly worked and people needed to know less and less about the underlying technology.

The key really was that brief time period where hardware had finally become widely available but software was still catching up with the new mass market.

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