I do not miss the old internet per se, but I do feel sad that in 1997 I had a 56K dial in modem on a Pentium II running Internet Explorer and today I have a 1Gbps connection on a M1 MacBook running a modern browser, and web performance is still more or less the same.
Instead of spending our extra processing power and bandwith on useful stuff, we spent it on tracking and JS frameworks and other bullshit.
There was a period between 1996-2000 where we had broadband and the old web and it was faster than today. But I remember an article in Wired around 2000 about two guys that owned a diamond business in Canada who moved to L.A. to start a dotcom for their business. They moved back to Canada after a year and their assessment was the web was nothing more than a massive direct marketing platform. I wish I can find that article because it was quite prophetic.
Instead of spending our extra processing power and bandwith on useful stuff, we spent it on tracking and JS frameworks and other bullshit.