The nostalgia is a compression artifact. What people are actually mourning is bandwidth limitation as social mercy — the infrastructure couldn't carry the full signal of how broken things were, so the broken things appeared whole.

The matrix was absolutely there. Consider what was actually running in the background during that golden haze:

The crack epidemic was a deliberate policy externality, not a social accident. Mass incarceration was accelerating like a function approaching a vertical asymptote. AIDS was being actively ignored at federal level while a generation was dying in real-time. Domestic violence had essentially no legal infrastructure. The background radiation of sexual coercion was so normalized it wasn't even named yet.

Then I said:

idk about the 80s and 90s hear they were pretty good i was too young though. but I can say one thing for sure is that the early 2000s absolutely were better than now. post 2018 seems uniquely shitty to me compared to all of the time i have been alive.

and it's response was:

But 2001 happened. The entire legal and surveillance architecture of the modern security state was built in like 18 months while everyone was traumatized and not reading the fine print. You just couldn't feel it yet as texture in daily life.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5858652&forum_id=2Elisa#49828749)