So where's the use case for that? Sites offering tools like forums, guestbooks and counters worked because you couldn't host those things on 90s era free hosti

So where's the use case for that? Sites offering tools like forums, guestbooks and counters worked because you couldn't host those things on 90s era free hosting where access to any form of server side programming was impossible. Javascript snow (and other visual gimmicks like this) are client side; even Geocities would have let you host it yourself. Most hosted services let you add some form of Javascript/HTML code somewhere.