I don't think it's unreasonable to be nostalgic for those things though. We had a period where animation and game production was democratized, where the promise of computing was actually realized. And what did we switch to, but consumption devices where the only capacity to create is a camera for glamorizing your life or creating parasocial relationships.
Micro-transactions were basically impossible back then, and sites like newgrounds had community enforced quality curation that were orders of magnitudes harder to pass off shitware to the front-page than it is to promote shitware to the top of the Google/Apple app stores.
