partly might be because nobody entered the 2020-internet all at once, and 2000s "internet era" was sort of similar to 90s "non-internet era"

1998 was roughly the year that average Americans started getting internet
I remember that era and it was basically the same as before for any elementary school kid, except in addition to going outside and playing gameboy, you'd also play some games on web browsers

research without google: My first report using google was in elementary school in 1999, and it was just a "supplement" to the already-available physical books we had. This pattern continued well into the 2000s, with the internet only becoming the main source of information (at least in schools) near the late 2000s.

aspects of the internet gradually became more like today--RAM got cheaper, HDD capacities increased, dial-up gave way to DSL/cable etc, and this took several years. As all of these things happened, software became more and more bloated to take advantage of the extra resources