Half of their users skip the on-boarding. Why would that make you feel far away from the current internet zeitgeist?

Presumably the user group you've self selected into also has a retention rate that is 20x lower than those that don't skip the on-boarding.

Because everything has onboarding now. Sometimes it's unskippable (think mobile games). It's always annoying, very frequently patronizing, and, frankly most people's app/site designs aren't that special because modern UX seems to have no more than a handful of designs for how tech is to be spoonfed to the masses.

Of course none of that matters because it makes another tiny, self-selected group considerably more money.