What I find really interesting is that people can heavily disagree what and when the old internet was. It may have ended anywhere from 1989 to 2023, brought by the introduction of the www, mass accessibility, social media, or Ai.
For me, this doesn't indicate that those young folks don't know what they are talking about. Rather, that missing the "old web" is more a cultural thing in itself. We got introduced to the web and discovered these communities we became part of, but something changed and our community died.
There had to be a cutoff that changed something! That killed our community. In reality the change, destruction of communities happened all the time. Some survived, some changed that returning to them wouldn't feel the same, some moved. If you don't feel part of that community anymore, it is destroyed, even if someone else thinks it is still alive and just moved to new-forum/teanspeak3/dig/reddit/discord/tumblr/facebook/tiktok/next thing.
The small Ultima online private server I used to be part of died, because a few people moved on with life, even though it was still there for a long time. Not because of WoW. My WoW guild suffered the same fate, despite Wow still being there. Now the few people I became close friends with are still left, wearing the guild name as a server name on discord, but that's a very different community.
Even if the exact people suddenly came back, it wouldn't be my community anymore.
My old web can't come back, because it is not a matter of technology.
I am sure the people that join the web today will lament the death of the old web of today in a decade.