nostalgic internet circlejerk yay!
I on the other hand am quite happy we've moved away, as a subculture, from the likes of geocities. While I'm not a huge fan of the chasing of one's own tail in terms of technical resources/requirements and having outdated technology before the dust fully settles, moore's law has still happened, and probably directly fueled by the concept of flashier/fatter content. I wouldn't want to imagine a world where technology was just like. "ok well, that's good enough, lets stop here"
If the internet stayed stagnant mid 80's/90's era and never evolved from that, or just went with the same level of fidelity but leaner, then the entire technological landscape would be significantly retarded in response, the content would have eventually gotten more optimized due to limitations and push to it's bounds, then pushing hardware to advance (through purchase power) would be at a much much slower rate. Advances we all enjoy today are probably directly because of the ever advancing requirements of unoptimized content constantly pushing the need for what the hardware was capable of and asking for more. The everyday consumer isn't intimately familiar with what they should actually expect from their hardware, and the concept of something amazing being able to ran on a toaster might be impressive to some, but is probably lost on the vast majority of the populace. While not a website, I remember being absolutely floored back in the day by the like of zsnes, and more recently drastic. People taking the time it takes to make something amazing that would be seemingly impossible when compared to the average much less optimized efforts.
Someday when moore's law hits the proverbial brick wall of the physics barrier (it's still running at full speed to) and potentially no longer able to go double the density at half the cost every couple of years, and going wider or taller has it's diminishing returns. Optimization will eventually again catch up with the old concept of throwing more resources at the problem. You see it on game consoles as they age. 1st wave of content is normally partially flashy and unoptimized, but as time goes on, you start seeing things like star ocean for the SNES happen. Like who in the hell would have thought you could do that much on the same chips that ran super mario world. True it was one of the last titles for the system, but coding skill, optimization, and familiarization show, you can do a whole lot once you know the ins and outs of a capability and learn to push the limits of what a no longer advancing system can offer. Those things take a lot more time, time we will have once we get to a point where the next major hardware advancement isn't just right around the corner. I look forward to that future, and it's a guarantee, but being able to throw another bigger log on the fire isn't and in fact someday... won't be possible..
So in summary, while we still have headroom for being able to throw resources at the problem, I say keep it coming, it's driving technology. It's unfortunate from the point of view of "look at what we were once capable of, it's all gone to shit!", and until we get to the point we can't just wait a year or two and buy something twice as awesome as we have today, I say let it be. But once we get to that point, then I'll be crying right next to you, clean up the code etc.
