Is the "old internet" really dead?
As you said, "only a few hobbyists wanted it".
Now I'm not sure that's entirely true. I knew some people that in the late 90s/early 0s had their own webpages, and weren't the type one would expect to do that sort of thing. Yet they started learning HTML or at least managed to use one of those chinsey old website builder tools. Their content wasn't that far from the stuff one sees on social media today though and they did stop with the "techie stuff" when social media became available to do it for them.
And it's true that a lot of the "techie stuff" has moved to social media as well, Github and Hackaday.IO come to mind.
But some small percentage of today's internet users do still create their own websites. Much of which is hobbyist content. There are even people still posting stuff on Gopher and Gemini (sort of a modernized Gopher).
It's easy to say this is dead because it's such a small percent of today's internet. But look how many more internet users, traffic and people there are now than then. Is this small percentage really that much less overall than the smaller thing that was the whole internet back in the day?
Or is it that the old internet, or at least something resembling and descended from it is still going but is dwarfed in size and "loudness" by this new thing that isn't really all that related except that it used the same physical network and protocols?