The fact that it was created by amateurs helped make it work incredibly well for amateurs.
The professional CS alternatives - gopher and the like - were not successful in comparison.
There's a thing in CS where solutions become so clever they become stupid - because the goal stops being task-oriented usefulness, and becomes ideological and formal purity.
It's the process that turns a plain hammer into an atomic pile driver you can only control remotely from the moon by sending it messages using catapulted owls in space suits. It's better at hammering in some abstract sense, but maybe not so much for hitting nails.
Abstraction without contextual insight is one of the most powerful and destructive of all anti-patterns.
On the web the professionals took over from the amateurs, and now web technology is another example of design-by-committee.
It still works surprisingly well because interplanetary owls are kind of fun, maybe, for some people. But is it ever a mess of half-solved problems generating recursive epicycles of complication.