In 2008, when IE7 came out, I cried of joy. I turned 22 that year, so the 7 years with only IE6 and Firefox was a significant chunk of my life. Firefox showed us that the web wasn't finished and could still be improved, and then came Firebug which made Firefox first web dev the obvious choice. But the vast majority still used IE6, so there was always a miserable step in the project of fixing all the IE bugs. After doing it for years and knowing your foe, it was by then a relatively quick and manageable experience. The real pain was in knowing all the CSS2 features and other goodies that could never be used. Seeing Microsoft recognizing that, yes indeed, the web wasn't finished in 2001 was actually an emotional moment at that point.

So yeah, the situation is without doubt much better now. I think people tend to forget (or aren't aware) that Microsoft actively said "there's no more work to be done here" and stopped all progress for 7 years. There's been some progress on the web since 2014, as a point of comparison.