Email was a hit well before the internet existed. The utility was immediately apparent. And while people had lots of concerns about the internet, like misinform

Email was a hit well before the internet existed. The utility was immediately apparent. And while people had lots of concerns about the internet, like misinformation and consumer-level utility, it was never broadly considered to be as dubiously useful or ethically fraught as LLMs and diffusion models. You can definitely find articles criticizing the bubble-forming finances, and one or two written by dedicated serial naysayers, but it was not a common perspective. Anybody who lived through that era will remember a hell of a lot more pushback against mobile phone adoption than Internet adoption, and even that was culturally marginal.