This has me thinking of how stovepiped Javascript + HTML + CSS apps are. Sure, you can do anything, but there are some things that are just easy. The current web feels like a progression of a few people figuring out a new trick, and then everyone adopting it at the same time.

I wonder what the web would have looked like if the web had been more like Hypercard. I think back to high school, with some students delivering their history projects as multimedia hypercard stacks on floppy disk. Weird times those were. And for as weird and unique as Geocities websites were, they all fit the page model.

The web feels like it's never been fully unconstrained in the way that something like Hypercard or Squeak were. We moved a lot of the analog world to the digital world in a hurry. At the start of it all, there was intense skepticism about the digital replacements for analog things because the digital thing more often than not sucked by comparison. I think Hypercard is evidence of a time when computer companies felt they were competing with a richer set of analog alternatives.

> It's free from monstrous JS frameworks. More information, less apps.

100%. The craptastic-ness of the modern JS web is driving a broader resurgence in things you might call "indie web" or "retro web". In addition to gopher, the Gemini protocol seems to be gaining traction and has a fairly active community.