That is some rose colored welding googles you're wearing there. In the late nineties we had applets, activex, pages crammed with animated gifs, and the browser wars were in full swing between SUN, Microsoft, netscape, internet explorer. And then flash rocked up. Again, it shows how the OP railing against over-design is so subjective. A lot of sites are meant to be interesting ways of showing information, or just people expressing themselves. People complaining about the design of websites (and writing snooty blog posts about it on usenet) happened in the nineties too, even more so when flash took over.

Any time I land on a webpage that has text that goes full width left-to-right with a white background and black text I feel there's a good chance it will be very useful content. I miss that.

I loved this too. The frontpage era content actually still works really well on today's modern screens. Most of them barely have any CSS in them even.

Just to note, HN does not got full width on my screen, and the background is not white.

I pretty much set everything I can to dark mode these days, so personally don't agree with white backgrounds in general.

Websites in 1990s and 2000s did not have UX flows that we have nowadays. Yes, most of it is extremely bloated. But some of the flows we have right now, would just not be possible with the 2000s components. There are also billions of more people browsing the web nowadays as well.

I'd say it's in between, the early web was funny but wild (popups or whatever the guy decided to do with dhtml) but there was an era of stable light ux, maybe just before the web 2, where you had a bit of ajax but simple webpages and near no bloat.

I'm curious about which flows you mean.