I like to think of that time as a great time too, but oh man so much we couldn't do.... I get what you're saying generally, but man I'd hate "before cookies" to be the standard.

I don't really see it as "what we couldn't do" but "what poor usability we have overcome". I'm glad we have cookies and other forms of local storage, especially for the latter there are many other benefits. Maybe one day we'll get Web SQL.

In the meantime people can still disable cookies entirely, or at least delete them when they close the browser, both with out of the box browser settings (and I have no idea what extensions are available to do even more) and return to that less-usable (if slightly more private) experience. The crucial idea of a "user agent" is I think the biggest mindset change the web brought, it's important to keep that even if on the dev side we constantly complain about being asked to support more than one configuration of anything.

Yeah I think that's accurate.

It's a little weird sometimes reading all these articles about cookies, JavaScript, etc and I always think "But I use those things to ... give people things, convenience, data, help them do things." But so many times it's not treated as a tool, it's almost implied to be a negative thing.

Most just do stuff nobody sees at any volume.

Have you ever reviewed how little you need in order to do all those things, outside of third-party dependencies? Any second guesses at all?

We didn't have e-commerce before cookies.

The same functionality of correlating multiple requests for a single request (building sessions upon packets) was just more difficult to use by encoding the session ID as a parameter in query string for each request. Many frameworks still support this mode.

SSL is largely irrelevant to banking security anyway. Actual security is built upon charge-back system. The underlying security model was designed when everyone trusted written checks.