>2008-2010 was peak web design
>AJAX cancer everywhere
The mid-90s until 2004 or so was better. Javascript cancer hadn't started to shit the place up yet. Where it was used it was very limited and there was always a non-JS fall back in place. CSS was decent for what it was. Tables were actually used for tabular data. iframes were typically used correctly. No smartphone-first designs. No endless scrolling.