What are you talking about?

Implementing secure online applications is easier today than it's ever been before. Free signed certificates are readily available to hobbyists through Let's Encrypt and other projects, and there are a number of lightweight TLS libraries available if you don't want to use OpenSSL, such as mbedTLS and wolfSSL.

If you need a protocol for document discovery and retrieval like the old internet and have the cooperation of the sites, then you can simply use basic https without javascript, all the things that Lynx browser can support, all the infrastructure is still there. But you can't force the websites to support that if their operators don't share these goals and values.

Sometimes. For example, there was a pretty organized effort to make plain http websites seem insecure, even if they were just informational sites.

I ran into Gemini last week looking into lightweight markup languages and Gemtext seems like an interesting one.

Gemini really does seem like a heavy handed approach (in a good way) to creating a pure hypermedia system and avoiding the road HTML went down. No Code-on-demand constraint, no concept of styling at all leaving display totally up to the client removes a ton of the complexity. I saw Gemini defined as "a better gopher" and think that's fairly accurate.