Hate to rain on the Linux parade here, but didn't the article say: "There are no ways to prevent such attacks except when the user's VPN runs on Android." and that Linux was just as vulnerable as Windows?
Dude! I see you everywhere!
I think you're singlehandedly feeding the fediverse content! But anyway, yes, there were nazis and trolls, but in my experience, there was a group sense of decorum that we were all in this new utopia together and those folks got flamed by the whole pretty thoroughly.
Like you, I was using the internet before the web. The time before monetization. IRC. USENET. GOPHER. IRC replaced my interest in ham radio - I figured: "what's the point? With a modem, I can talk around the world and don't need thousands of dollars and a tower in my back yard!" packet radio, which I used to send and receive messages to my parents, evaporated.
Even when the web first came to being, it was special. HoTMaiL, the free html mail client, took off like wildfire. There weren't even ads, because the ad industry didn't know what to do with this new medium. Search found relevant interests, people were expressing themselves on ISP-hosted websites, and angelfire and geocities gave a more feature-rich experience.
The initial banner ads were easy enough to ignore. The pop-ups, scareware, and security hell hole that was the early/mid-2000's was the precipice that the web stepped off and here we are.