The whitewashing of the past in this thread is something else.

Did everyone forget the era of web browsing when pages were filled with distracting animated banner ads?

The period when it was common for malicious ads to just hijack the session and take you to a different page?

The pop-up tornados where a page would spawn pop ups faster than you could close them? Pop unders getting left behind to discover when you closed your window?

Heavy flash ads causing your browser to slow to a crawl?

The modern web browsing experience without an ad blocker feels tame compared to the early days of Internet ads.

What you describe sounds like the late nineties to me, not what we had with the technology of (at most) 1990. There are orders of magnitude between available performance and memory on both ends of this decade.