Well, I started out using Microsoft FrontPage at one point, but once I knew enough about HTML I migrated over to Notepad, driven in part by it being the fashion

Well, I started out using Microsoft FrontPage at one point, but once I knew enough about HTML I migrated over to Notepad, driven in part by it being the fashion among some percentage of the developer community at the time (there was an attitude where the less tools you needed, the more you were taken seriously as a developer, with WYSIWYG ones getting the least respect). I know I used FTP to upload the pages, though I'm not sure which program I used. And I usually used free hosting providers too. More like Tripod and my ISP than Geocities, but it was all usually the same anyway. No (or very little) support for anything beyond HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and the ever present ads all over the place. If you want to simulate this setup with an M1 Mac, then probably TextEdit and the FTP program of your choice along with Neocities.