I recall well those discussions. Web stores did indeed often use https to protect credit cards. The argument was however that physical stores did not need to have similar protection, and that the issue really was with the weak security of credit cards. HTTPS was a ugly and a unstable solution for a problem which people argued should had been solved with the credit card system. Physical security devices was again lifted as the future solutions to this problem.

It should also be mentioned here that credit card numbers as a security token has actually slowly been phased out in favor of other forms of payment systems online, and many banks today implement additional security requirement if you pay with a credit card. Black market with stolen CC numbers used to be one of the biggest issues with the internet, so even with all the stores using https it wasn't a great fix for that problem.

I remember people talking about performance issues with https until the early 2010. "Every single micro second slower means reduced sales" was something people was very concerned about. I even heard it from people during an IETF meeting. It was similar to how people today talk about SEO.