And I'd gladly trade today's BS for any version of "The Internet" pre-2007.
But the "Before" Internet wasn't some natural sustainable state.
Before 1997 or so, "the Internet" was being paid for by academic institutions and big companies, and wasn't really all that commercial at all. It was also pretty tiny and blessedly simple. Honestly this version is the most achievable (re-creatable?) today since we can set up indie websites much easier today than we could then. Instead of using your free webspace from your university or employer, 20 of us could share a $5 a month instance, and link to each other's webpages, and add an IRC server to that instance just for fun.
In the 1998-2007 era, the Internet got a lot bigger, but was also still pretty fun and not that enshittified, but that's just because it was being paid for by VC money being burned.
Today we are where we are in terms of business model[1] because Google and Facebook achieved great success with ad-based business models because of the ability to target ads better, and because consumers of The Internet have spoken, loudly, with their closed wallets. They've said "We will only pay for content if it's All The Music and ~$10 a month flat rate, or if it's a big/interesting enough video on-demand service and under $20 a month. We'll never pay for news or text content of any kind." So, the businesses with other types of content do what the public wants them to do: have cost-free content whose access is conditional on being advertised to very annoyingly, or they marginalize themselves with paywalls, subscribed to by only a small minority of users.
[1] i'm setting aside the non-business aspects of our mess, namely the poison that social media, 'engagement' optimization, and ragebait-as-news has wrought on society.