Sometimes I come across webrings and visit the sites linked on them. Most of them are simple HTML sites written by teenagers who are just beginning to learn web development, who have been inspired by a YouTuber or recent cultural social media trends into making their own independent website. I don't think they are doing this form a technological perspective, rather trying to convey some political statement about how soulless and corporatized the web has become. I think that's a problem worth noting.
The problem with the Y2K movement is that it's fake nostalgia. The teenagers who participate in this 'movement' don't understand good design, don't understand technology well enough, and are largely tunnel visioned by ideology. They don’t even have any good cultural grounds to be talking about this. Everything they learn about the “old web” is from second-hand experience being told to them. Going through that stage of the internet yields a certain kind of ‘maturization’ process that these teens are clearly lacking. I think the whole decentralized/old web is set in stone to be done by paranoid schizophrenic channers who use librebooted Thinkpads, not Twitter armchair revolutionary teens.
What's more, a lot of these teenagers tend to be mentally unwell. Early schizophrenics, bipolar, borderline, autistic, ADHD, etc. To me it seems clear that they want to belong to some sort of group and want to make a change in the world. The sad thing about it is that their way of changing the world is making obnoxiously unreadable and colorful websites thinking that they're reviving the old and independent web, even though most of those websites become dead links just like every other website, once the author loses interest. They're nothing more than an artistic/political statement, most of them can't really outlive past their usefulness.
To add at least something somewhat positive to this thread, the real independent web is represented by websites like https://gwern.net
