When I accessed the 'basic internet' of text and maybe a couple of images, I was using a dial-up modem, and pages would typically take longer to load than just about any website now, back then, in the UK, there was no faster way to access the internet from home, so it was the same for everyone. Back then, hyperlinks would often go to a 404, images were often missing (similar reason), layout standards hadn't really been established so every site was different and it was often hard to find things, etc. I could get a download speed of around 3 KB/s, so just having a single 30 KB image (which is tiny) would take 10 seconds to load.
I don't know when you were on the "basic" internet, but layout standards were pretty well established by gopher. Granted, we didn't keep using that, we wanted to go do whatever we wanted to, so we did.
The Internet was much more interesting when sites were different, and people put content first instead of discoverability.
As for speed, considering that Internet connections are insanely faster these days... Sure, a website with not much on it might take 30 seconds to load back in the day, but today, most websites, even ones that are pretty basic, still can be measured in seconds for how long it takes to load. So, if we consider you were maxing out at 3KB/s, and I've seen modern download speeds over 30MB/s... Something is wrong, proportionally.
Though, I suppose that's largely due to giant libs being pulled in just to use a few functions.
I'm not sure what my point was here, but I think it's that gopher was cool and organized, and the web isn't fast enough considering modern connections and computer power proportionally.
Oh, that's right, it feels like everything these days is made at the expense of responsiveness.