Bro that’s anecdotally false, there were so many ham, electronics and random research sites I perused on angelfire and geocities.
Quality varied greatly, but lots of thought went into making posts, diagrams were sometimes done in ASCII art which was its own headache.
Point is, I don’t agree with your take, and I don’t think my similarly aged friends would agree either. Internet of late 90s/y2k wasn’t an ad-free utopia, but the point was more about conversing and sharing info.
Lemmy is an attempt to return to that original intent, modernized as it must be.