Not to sound like a broken record, but your problem is with late stage capitalism. That said, nostalgia does have a tendency to erase the memories of the bad and preserve only the good parts. There was a lot of shit going on during those years that sucked just as much as things suck today. Gates was raping the tech sector, Microsoft was in the whole EEE model, there were anti-trust lawsuits, Steve Jobs was nothing but drama after drama (Pixar, Apple, worker's suicides in China). ISPs had quickly consolidated into oligopolies that still abuse users today. HP was spying on their own employees. Facebook was a shit show constantly moving from drama to drama as well. Exploding smartphones. Scam biotech companies. Video games in general have always just been shareholder dick size competition that end up hurting the users. Media conglomerates eating each other alive. Blackberry boomed then collapsed. The dot-com bubble bursting. Not to mention millions of dollars scammed out of people during the first days of Bitcoin, endless data breaches, and the beginning of mass surveillance on a global scale.

A lot of awful definitely not fun stuff happened. We just naturally tend to forget about details. Think about this, Android is older than iPhone, is just that Android wasn't on phones. But almost no one remembers that detail because we instead stay with the vibes and feelings.