There were a lot more people much more ready to publicly make (IMHO terrible) arguments about how a jpg is just a stream of bits, which is a number, and you can't just arbitrarily ban specific large integers. Or about how nobody is harmed if streams of bits get passed around, it's just data, ones and zeroes, that's not harming anyone. Or that the data is encoded, so it's meaningless without a decoder, a different decoder could decode that bitstream into literally anything else.
Fundamentally these arguments were always pretty nasty and meritless. It's images/video of kids being raped, the continued existence and trading of which can be argued to do continuing harm to the victims. The accessibility of this stuff also goes some way to normalise the behaviour and create bubbles in which there is demand for new material, so more kids get abused.
Ideas of children being unable to consent were well established in law and society though, it was only 20 years ago, so that bit about consent does stick out considerably. But again in certain corners of the internet * there were people who would argue about it, you hope theoretically.
( * and not that obscure, pretty sure you could find this sort of stuff in the comments on slashdot back in that sort of time-period)