I think you are looking at the past through incredibly rose-tinted glasses. The web has been a mess for a long time, and we used to have to make sure our computer was set to 800x600 and we were using Internet Explorer 6 in order to even use it.
And it is not rare now either. Nothing has changed in that regard. Things have just gotten massively slower, use insane amounts of CPU, and are less functional.
I know that. The date range was not exclusive. The point was that high resolution CRTs date quite a bit back even for consumer use. We had no problems browsing the web.