Remember when technology people made Standards instead of Platforms
Email. IRC. SMS. HTML and shit. The fucking internet itself
Those things would never ever be made today. Instead they'd be shitty proprietary apps that probably only work on shitty proprietary hardware and can't be used by anyone without permission from the company that patented them
That's still kinda happening today? With stuff like dat and SSB and ActivityPub. But all of that is super super niche and technical and not at all accessible to the average user (with the exception of AP as of pretty recently). And it just sucks man, web 2.0 is bullshit