If you mean the internet of the time when consumers first got it, around 1999, absolutely not. I don't even remember scams being remotely as common. You were

If you mean the internet of the time when consumers first got it, around 1999, absolutely not. I don't even remember scams being remotely as common. You were just as likely to be scammed in a retail store or a magazine ad. The technology was horrible. I would take today's CSS3 and JS frameworks any day. It was slow, despite being largely text and JS free. But the content made up for it. The content was all written by real people, on real pages you could link to, no endless scrolling. I always say 2005-2009 was when everything but tech got really miserable.