Does it legitimately scare anybody else sometimes?

No, I completely agree. We've been throwing away so much good stuff, and for what? So a bunch of joyless execs can watch numbers go up? They've been taking away every form of self-expression that can't be monetized. Outrage is the only approved feeling anymore. Machines and apps from just a few years ago are made obsolete on purpose. This is a war. Against our minds.

I wouldn't say it scares me, but I've also been simmering in the
internet and the technology that drives it for decades now. The internet
of today is the end result of a pretty obvious progression.
Those  individual websites were a pain to maintain. We all learned HTML and did
it, but managing those sites beyond a few pages got tedious. And once
CSS came along it got worse. So blog template formats and social media
came along to eliminate the raw layout management for most people.
The  other thing was that readers would have to go through the tedium of
going to each individual site. That worked okay if you only read 5-10,
but beyond that keeping up was nightmarish. RSS tried to solve that, but
it wasn't really polished, standards were lax, support was bad, and
even if you did it well.. you ended up with a flood of stuff. I was good
at RSS. It was sometimes HOURS of my day catching up on things.
So curated content came along. Now you go to Reddit or some trash
aggregation site, or the grease trap of 4chan, and people with more
disposeable time will push interesting things to the top for you to
find. It isn't a great system, but it makes finding new content, and
staying on top of popular content a lot easier. Not a great system, but
neither were the ones before it.
I won't deny that the soul-dead corporate places on the internet are the least interesting things I've seen, but there are places that still have life.You can still host your own site. You can still make your own games. They might not ever be popular, but there's nothing stopping new people from doing it except ignorance.
Though the death of flash certainly made the games thing more difficult.

It's not about community at all anymore, it's all about money. If you wanna make a mark on the internet, you better know how to make money because that's all that matters. There's sites like Reddit or 4Chan back when it was a thing, and others that have/had communities, but they're so parsed and so broken off from most other folks that you've got these distant communities that have very little to do with others. 

The internet is no longer a place to explore, talk to people, find new stuff, any of that. It's now a place to manipulate you into interacting and throwing as much money into corporations as much as they can squeeze out of you, through any means they deem necessary, your mental well-being be damned.

I completely feel you, but with Windows XP and (especially) Windows 7 instead of Windows 98. I grew up using both of those operating systems when I was in elementary school and they felt more fun and more full of life than today's Windows operating systems. I would always play Adobe Flash games and sometimes watch videos YouTube on those computers at school and at home.

I will never forget how sad and disappointed I was when the family computer was upgraded from beautiful Windows 7 to boring Windows 10 in July 2015. Windows 10 feels so hollow and so empty even to this day in December 2022 compared to those awesome XP and 7 operating systems I grew up with. Not only were the Luna and Aero designs both a lot better than the stupid minimalist design of Windows 10, but they also provided a way more genuine feeling of the digital wild west compared to 10.

Fuck minimalism, fuck modern social media sites turning us into human robots/zombies, and fuck digital surveillance.

I don't think it's hopeless, I believe VR is gonna be the next frontier like how the early internet used to be once it's had enough time. Might not seem like much now, but there will certainly be major innovative leaps in due time. 

YES. i hate how everyone is upgrading their technology every 4 seconds now. theres plenty of functional old tech out there that people just cant use anymore because nobody can service them or sells parts for them anymore etc. 

also FUCK BIG COORPORATIONS. FUCK APPLE. i had a perfectly functioning iphone 7, but after a while apple just dosent let you get any more software updates on older phones, so eventually the phone just stopped working. and so now i have to go buy a new phone. people are literally trading in their perfectly functional iphone 13's just so they can get 14s these days, i swear. and the worst part? there is virtually no difference between any phone model these days except for the camera maybe.

this whole obsession with getting new tech is absolutely consumerist propaganda that is bad for our pockets, and bad for the environment.

TL;DR

• plenty of old tech that works, but no one services them
• big companies using tactics to make people buy more
• bad for environment and waste of money

also ti agree with you on the lack of personal pages too. i only recently realised how everything is now run by a big company or news site or whatever. you have to go out of your way to try find personal sites, search engines dont prioritize them because they dont pay them too. im just gratefull for forums like this that have introduced me to ways of finding personal sites, and other relics of the old internet.