In 1996, did every traffic attorney publish a thought piece on why you should fight your summons in X county?

No, back then if you searched a topic you were MUCH more likely to find self hosted content from someone who nerded out on an issue and is sharing their insight, not publishing boilerplate because they feel they need to.

The number of internet users is currently 150x more than it was in 1996. I don't think you can make an argument that it was already mainstream in '96 with a few tens of millions of people on it.

The web was overwhelmingly informational up to an inflection point where it became overwhelmingly commercial. That's the thing people are upset about.

This is absolutely right. The web died about then, really. What we have now is shameful and embarrassing, and society is poorer for it.

And it's not Google's fault.

But it also remains true that Google's search just doesn't work well for many people, and that some alternatives work better for them.