These are some more general thoughts on the subject:

I'm going to take issue with any statement that puts Facebook. And "just fine" in the same sentence. A terrible company run by largely terrible people.

The good old days of fan forums and communities that grew around shared interests in the dial-up age had a vital advantage: small user numbers and low cost. Mostly text based packets were cheap to send and receive. At very low speeds. It was inevitable that standards would rise, and with it, costs. And if money becomes a factor, whoever has or makes it rules. An inevitable and irreversible development if you ask me.

And if it's the niche community nostalgia that hits you, you can still have that. It's probably on a small fediverse server you'll also need to support financially or on a Discord server. The internet people loved largely survived if you knew where to look and all the other stuff just grew around it. And only occasionally over it. No service is eternal. There will be a time when Insta will be a faint memory. Or reddit. Or Wikipedia.

The early internet also had a terrible impact on what it became much later. People put their content out for free/as supported, especially media offerings and the news, and instilled in consumers the expectation that one shouldn't have to pay for shit online. This was the first domino falling in local newspaper death and an increased disillusionment with politics.

Another problem of the early internet is that it was built by mostly idealists who created the perception that connecting the world would democratise knowledge and participation and it would be a force for good. This hype carried us through its expansion and people saw the negative sides far too late if you ask me. The threat of surveillance was waved mostly away. That hype is not so dissimilar to what we are seeing with so-called AI these days.

Organised social media created a bias that the loudest voices there were a majority. The flood of bots may actually finally cure us of that perception. I call it organised because the early chat rooms around Star Wars or X-Files or something like that were a form of social media before we had a name for it.

You haven't missed anything from the early internet. Unless you want people fighting over landline phone connections and waiting hours for a solitary picture of some boobs to download. The internet isn't good or bad, it's a tool and people use it for good or evil. Always have (remember the anarchist cookbook?), always will do.