Sort of like how we used to have great expectations for the United States, which we believed (by not looking at history) was the shining city on the hill where utopia and justice would be achieved Real Soon Now.

Alas, great expectations are ever betrayed by real outcomes.

As for the Internet we all believed in, (a) I was addicted to computers long before it existed -- before ARPAnet, even. I've watched the whole show! And (b) it is still here! You can see examples everywhere, even on my sites like https://jick.net/ -- and you can still participate: just buy a domain and point it to your home computer! You will have to learn a lot of tricks to prevent getting hacked... like for starters, run Linux, not Windoze... and it will gobble up a lot of your time, and Google will not send people to you, because you didn't pay a SEO expert to optimize it; but those who don't care about click-counting will love it, for all the reasons you listed. (You don't want those other people's attention anyway!)