This site has the vaporwave neon and the intentionally shitty gifs (like the Under Construction one that used to be the landing page). The website for r/SubredditDrama is intentionally disastrous (it’s rdrama.net, but be warned it’s even more full of brainworms than the subreddit). A lot of sites will use chan or PhpBb boards. Even the plug-and-play Reddit alternatives have universally opted for the “old” Reddit style combined with whatever nightmarishly boomer custom CSS their ancestor community used to have.

Maybe this point seems obvious, but I think there’s probably more to it than “current Internet sucks and the old internet looks good by comparison”