There are three reasons why this happens. The first is described perfectly by bjornn:
> <...> corporate business world of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s was just as sleazy and run by assholes as it is today; the only difference is that the technology is finally catching up with the ambitions of said sleazy assholes and allowing them to do what they've been trying to do since the outset, <...>
Second, computers are cheap now. They are no longer for the financial and/or intellectual elite.
Third, there is an overall culture/intellecual/value decline in the Western world. Probably because life after the Cold War was too easy. Now many(?) young people, at least in America, can't write by hand, and men who cut their genitals are not considered to be in need of very serious therapy, and Harvard students support HAMAS, and so on.
Looks nice, but I would prefer true minimalism. That is, something similar, but without necessaty to use additional 500-line CSS (God! Please, kill this format in the most painful way!) and other a d d i t i o n a l stuff that is used to get a minimalistic look-and-feel. What we really need is something like a POSIX standard for web. We don't need to re-invent the wheel for this. Just take HTML4, CSS2, and so on.