It's also that common design tropes hadn't been established yet. At the time we were all just winging it and doing whatever came to mind within the scope of our abilities. As we became more connected online, and interactions became more realtime, our tastes homogenized, leading to what we have now.
The asset is more akin to a deed or a claim. Most NFTs are images hosted on S3 or IPFS. The blockchain entry is metadata with a pointer to the hosted asset.
If that's what happened, I wonder if the same filters exist for tools like Grammarly. Some people are English as a second language, and some people simply want to put the best foot forward and make the best first impression.
I have very fond memories of PHPBB. A lot of tech communities migrated to Discord now, so that chat history is not indexable by search engines, which makes finding information a little tough. When building Uproar chat, to combat that "lost information" that is inherent to chats, we added a pin-to-feed feature so you can pin anything you said in chat to a publicly viewable feed, which is indexable by search. It's not as nostalgic or "great" as PHPBB was, but it's better than nothing.