Hard disagree, that hope and inspiration nonsense is totally ahistotical and the exact same thing boomers do with the 1950s and 60s (for them it was the atomic age and sexual revolution and being optimistic that fascism and world wars were behind them)

When the second world fell at the end of the Soviet Union the expectation was that the second world would become part of the first world and the third world would begin it moves towards being a benevolent second world and eventually become part of the first world too.

And a bunch of first world hopes that everyone would just forget all coups and death squads and other terrible stuff we did in the cold war, and hopes that we could all just finally forget about fighting for civil rights and the environment and other tough stuff like that because we'd somehow permanently solved those issues and could just turn everything over to markets.

It was also a time of a second coming of the civil rights movement, the 90s are when it became OK to be gay for the most part

Matthew Shepherd was murdered in 1998, legal rights like health insurance access for partners and hospital visitations wouldn't come til decades later, we were still educating most people on the fact that AIDS wasn't just a gay disease, etc.

1992 was The Year of the Woman, largely in response to and in spite of the Anita Hill debacle

But the Anita Hill debacle did happen, plus Jerry Seinfeld dated a high schooler and nobody thought it was weird, and whether or not sexual harassment was a real thing society needed to care about was still being argued (you can see this in all sorts of pop culture from the time, the whole attack on "political correctness" was all about dudes wanting to be able to say misogynistic shit at the office and not get called out for it)

There was an open-mindedness and a willingness to accept progress

Pundits on TV called black teenagers super predators and said they should be tried as adults and tons of states changed their laws to make it easier to do exactly that