This is great!

Absolutely. I also hand-edited HTML (and XHTML and CGI scripts and Java applets) back in those days and the majority of web pages were no more than a few hundred lines of code long. Regular notepad.exe was absolutely fine at home, and I did a lot of editing server-side in vi. It was a simpler time....

I think the thing these "old internet revivals" miss is they looked the way they did was because they were outsider-art. I don't think they have to reuse precisely the same layout tools, but non-developers butting heads with those tools was a big factor in why personal sites looked that way. The whole look of "old internet" is a modern concept that's a bit flanderized [0] now.

Nothing wrong with nostalgia, but I agree with you that the wrong things are being equated here. A tool that just quickly generates a visually-similar site to that somewhat-imagined "old internet look" isn't really the same. If you emulated a similar amount of friction to those old site with modern tooling, you'd end up with an actual spiritual successor to those geocities sites. (NeoCities [1] is a great example, a lot of personal sites on there are not targeting 90s-2000s nostalgia even if that's an obvious aesthetic direction to go for something called "NeoCities")

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanderization

[1] https://neocities.org/