This website is like a piece of paper that's glued to the wall like you ripped it off of a magazine. There's panning and scrolling. The mental model of the page is vividly clear. Navigation is straightforward and predictable. Menu doesn't move. The 'staticness' of these old sites is undervalued and now kind of forgotten.
Compare this with modern full screen webapps that give you no sense of where you are on the page and molasses-like animated UI that captures native scrolling. These websites have their own abstraction layer to navigate, browse and present things. Almost like motion picture that presents information to you and you don't have much control. Signifiers that visually inform you of interactability are misplaced or entirely missing. You have some illusion of control but it's nowhere as explicit as a static page.
There is an ad-tech-smell and "pop" in modern websites as they take over your visual field in mysterious, unpredictable ways. Doesn't let go of the attention easily. Huge typography and motion effects captivate users kinda like a 30-sec advertisement. Crack cocaine of information consumption.
Combine this with terrible decisions at the OS-level like making scrollbars invisible, practice of UI/UX is deeply unserious today. It's not like we don't have solutions and it's an unknown problem. We have the blueprints. We had it all and we deliberately abandoned it with great carelessness. But in a certain light, the practice of UI/UX today is deeply serious in the ad-tech aspects and bedazzles their userbase with ever-increasing sense of bedazzlement. What purpose does Apple Liquid Glass UI serve otherwise?
Open for discussion and critique.
Windows Mobile website in 2005