I'd say the over exploitation of JavaScript to leverage tracking, interaction and marketing has helped create the poor experiences we now have on web. The underlying technology when used for creating interactive and helpful UIs is very beneficial

May I introduce you to the Gemini project?

It's a new(ish) protocol for sharing interlinked text documents. It's intended to sit between Gopher and HTML in terms of complexity and is deliberately, aggressively simple (some might even say crippled) with the intention that it will be nearly impossible to extend the protocol for surveillance capitalism. It's not trying to replace ye olde WWW, but to provide a human-focused place for text-first, 90's-style sites to live. ...just without the blink tags.