None of what you said explains what they are talking about lol.

It’s like you have no experience with what they’re talking about

I don't like elitism. The least techy people I know are the most culturally similar to what I was seeing on the Internet 20 years ago.

Because despite being less necessary for daily survival and thus less popular, it was also less structured and less hierarchical.

It's the other way around honestly, the "techy types knowing better" have built leviathans.

You might not see it, but when people talk about some "better" Internet, an alternative timeline from the 90s to what we got, it's funny. Because there are people who have that better Internet, Facebook's and Google's and others' infrastructure inside is basically that. These companies and other such have been created and driven by that exact smarter kind of people which you seem to claim was opposed to the bad changes that transpired in the world and on the Internet. And the "democratized" crowd of monkeys was complaining, but couldn't do anything. Then that same crowd, yes, started using what was given to them. Because the crowd of monkeys is wiser, they look at the whole forest and not some particular trees, as they are not the foresters, and they see when the wind changes. They are not interested in sectarian holywars over specific technologies or elitism on tech, because their interests and elitism are usually in different domains.

Each and every case of something not shit becoming shit is connected to a group of smartasses getting their way at forcing the world go some chosen path. Because nobody is smart enough to choose that path correctly, and when those not smart enough people can no longer get each and every other person's approval to what they're doing before doing that, they are turning things into shit.

I also remember how in year 2003 as a kid I loved HTML 4 and such as they were and didn't understand what are all those movements to CSS, why Flash is bad, and so on. I was a monkey. There were some smarter monkeys who'd say there's technological development ahead of us, and that it will be better than what we have. And there were some wiser monkeys, who'd predict correctly where all this is going.

OK, some of the wiser monkeys were also studying CS, so now I'm simplifying things to help my claim.

It's just - when a smaller group decides for all, this is called degeneracy. Degeneracy is not a compliment to the organism described as degenerate.