Maybe during the "flash" era, but as a consistent user of elinks, it has always made the web much more readable to me.

I quit using Lynx (and other text mode browsers) when I started hitting a lot of sites that wouldn't render. This was largely after Flash. I seem to remember JavaScript being a problem. I started using Lynx in the 90's over dialup, telneting into a Unix machine.

Sounds about like my experience too. I used to use it about half of the time up until 2003 or so when I got tired of having to guess how much hassle it was going to be to deal with frames, etc.

Maybe you didn't look too far? By 2003 I was using elinks that had great tables and frames support.