Also from the same era was implausibly popular 'dynamic HTML' site Dynamic Drive, where users could copypaste semi-curated JS, which was responsible for some of the worst code ever to be deployed on the internet.

I honestly don't know if it helped move web development forwards or held it back!

I once argued that the best thing that ever happened to web-development in terms of adoption was "view source" and how easily accessible it was.

Absolutely! That and being able to run code directly in the context of the page through the dev tools console.

Even these days if i'm having a poke around somebody else's work, one of the first things i do is to pop open the dev tools and start seeing which libraries they're running and what their custom namespaces are.

You could always scroll down to the bottom of the page where they were uncensored.

IIRC: _can_, not _could_. They only started doing that when Google started punishing them in their search results for not showing others what they showed Google's robots.