I'll say one thing, and I know it will come off as cliche: If you weren't there, you may not understand.
In the early days of the consumer Internet (mid/late 90s) there was a real wild west / gold rush feeling to things and it did feel like we were changing the world (spoiler: most of us weren't).
I am not defending or excusing anything here, just saying that I'm sure it was a lot easier for some people, perhaps already predisposed to such behaviours, to become unhealthily obsessed with working on new Internet tech at the time because it was incredibly exciting to be working on what was genuinely a new frontier back then.
I was a teen but I remember watching my dad work on one of the first video codecs and playing a small video on an even smaller square frame inside a tiny computer monitor and him telling me how this would be the future… his codec wasn’t the main stream we use today but he was right and it was definitely a gold rush / change the world feel. Later in the 2000s for me I carried that same feeling we worked our asses off and yeah it didn’t amount to much but we learned so much… in the 2010 it’s how I was able to go on the build my own software business… It’s why I believe hard work , dedicated and consistent work does yield results that are worth it
I mean look at the Web today using TCP, IPv4, HTML/CSS/JavaScript, with companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon. If the internet was created with what we know now it would look much different. You will never be able to create a technology or company so flawed like that today.
I don't think most of us knew what the Internet would look like in 25 years. My guess back then was way more regulation, as opposed to the commercial monopolies we have today, but what did I know, I was barely in my 20s..
All the stuff you listed above (except for HTML/CSS/JS) already existed and was not invented in the 90s, and was already the foundation of the Internet at that point.
There was not much chance of changing or disrupting those things.
Also hindsight is 20/20 of course. Easy to look back two decades and say "what were they thinking?" etc..
In the early days of the consumer Internet (mid/late 90s) there was a real wild west / gold rush feeling to things and it did feel like we were changing the world (spoiler: most of us weren't).
I am not defending or excusing anything here, just saying that I'm sure it was a lot easier for some people, perhaps already predisposed to such behaviours, to become unhealthily obsessed with working on new Internet tech at the time because it was incredibly exciting to be working on what was genuinely a new frontier back then.