I disagree with your idea of real world turbulence affecting it. Things were going the wrong way even in 2005. Dotcom bubble, Iraq war, those things - maybe.

I actually think that USSR's breakup is what long-term caused how our world has become worse.

Say, in terms of computers and mass culture too, they sometimes treat the 90s as a result of that breakup, but that doesn't quite make sense, despite a few armed conflicts, it was a gradual process, CIS as an organization was treated as almost a new union in making even in my childhood.

That breakup has released a lot of dirty money into the world, and through not the cleanest people in western countries, too.

And ideologically - the optimist version of the Cold War ending was some syncretic version of the "western" and the "eastern" promises for the space-faring united future. And much of the 90s was about, often dystopian, but fantasies in the context of such an utopia.

IRL both optimist promises were forgotten. Thus the current reality.