Also agree. However, I do yearn to relive the days where one can load up a web page and start reading content, without being jarred by pop-ups and ads that inadvertently move the content post load (which of course happens 3 seconds later..).

I know a site, it's on mobile. You use it by entering a location in a search bar.

You select the search bar, the keyboard takes a second to appear. You start typing, nothing happens because they've reimplemented the text box in javascript, and the script hasn't fully loaded yet. The script loads and the second half of the letters you typed appears in a letter by letter fashion. The page freezes and a suggestion box appears, every second or so the suggestions change to reflect the letters you typed earlier. You erase what you've typed. With every letter that changes, the page freezes a second as a new suggestion loads. When it freezes, it stops accepting letters, so there's a lot of erasing and re-typing. Alright, you're almost done typing... then the page freezes and the page turns grey, and a pop over loads. They want you to load fill out a satisfaction survey. You try to close it to continue, but the script handling the close button hasn't loaded yet so it doesn't work for a good 20 seconds.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a javascript stomping on a human face -- for ever.

This accurately describes my experience using Google Search on Google Chrome on a Google Pixel 5 running the latest version of Google Android (for good measure, using Gboard). It baffles me that for a long time I couldn't even select text in the search bar without something going so wrong that my phone ground to a halt and had to soft reboot.

There was an article posted here [1] a few weeks ago called I Don’t Like Computers which had the same nostalgic vibe about computing in the past and I argue it boils down to loss of control. End users used to be in charge. We used to be in the driver’s seat. We used to tell computers what to do. Now, with pop-ups, ads, notifications, and so on, they tell us what we should be doing and we have to beg and work around them to do what we want. “Where do you want to go today?” is long dead.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30851371

Ad blockers are so good that I nearly forgot about this experience.