Well, hypertext is "hyper" because it is more than just text - images, animations, as well as links, are the most basic building blocks of the Web. It's not like we've invented animated GIFs in the current decade - the pages in the 90s were as full of unnecessary "things" as they are now; if there's a difference it's in what things the tech lets you shove into your HTML.

Also, you can get pretty close to the experience from the 90s if you disable loading images in your browser and/or use uMatrix or something similar. You'd be amazed how much faster it makes the web, at least on the pages which support plain HTML (instead of rendering everything in JS). You will be missing most of the visual bells and whistles, but it was also like that back in the day: not only did graphic elements (and don't even mention Java applets) take forever to load, they frequently stopped loading altogether, leaving you with a cute Netscape icon in a place where the image should be.

I guess what I want to say is that there was never a time when a majority of "webmasters" designed their pages for simplicity. People creating the web pages were testing the limits of the medium since its inception, and what we have now is a consequence of the limits being removed by better technology.

In other words, people who create websites were always shooting themselves and their users in the foot, back then with some ASG, then later with increasingly potent guns and now they're shooting with 10 meters long cannon. And it's not going to get any better, unfortunately, because most people want their eye candy - just as much now as back in the nineties.

Wouldn't you also say the modern web is being used for more than just reading text, though?

Online banking and shopping come to mind as 2 things that have greatly improved convenience for the average Joe user. Not to mention some interactive tutorials and complex calculators (is wolfram-alpha bloated? I honestly don't have the expertise to comment).