I think I'm beginning to understand why vaporwave is a thing. It harks back to a simpler time when we all looked forward to jacking into cyberspace with our Ono-Sendai decks, but the Mac (or Windows 3.x/9x PC for true pedestrians) on our desk with NCSA Mosaic and a 28.8kbps modem brought us close enough. Before trolls (unless you hung out on USENET), before 4chan, before everyone tried to sell you an app, and sell your data to some advertiser.
For me computing peaked in the late 1990s. NT4 and Word Perfect 7, surfing the internet on a 256 Kbps SDSL modem.
Some would say August of 1993.
And before drive by infections of all kinds...
Neal Stephenson wrote a pretty interesting essay on the societal implications of deemphasizing text. In the beginning was the command line: http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
I'm getting pretty good mileage out of using uBlock Origin's "Advanced user" mode and by default filtering everything (other than the initial HTML). Then as needed I can allow images, JavaScript, third party content, etc. progressively. The base experience though is much like the 90s web experience. Of course there are sites with almost no content in the the initial HTML file.
Now, there was a lot of crap on the web back then, but it was still text maybe with some blinky graphics. On today's rich media sites you sometimes can't even select the text. E.g. try copying the address out of a location that Google shows in response to a search (on mobile at least). Text is the basis of civilization--surely deemphasizing text represents the downfall of it.