This is it. Not only were web developers much more "bothered" with putting actual effort into trying to produce a considered product in the past, they did so without the tooling we take for granted today.
Half the projects I've worked on recently use contexualised i18n wrappers to process and output strings, or an equivalent custom generic React component, or similar. How simple would it be to add `lang=""` support to such a workflow, compared to what would have been involved in doing this 10 years ago (I'm aware this might seem exaggeration as 10+ years ago we still had similar stuff with gettext, et al—still used today by even Wordpress—but I'm more talking about recent changes to tooling-oriented frontend web development, which should in theory have made this type of stuff a lot easier).
As an attempt to sway you, consider that I'm in no way suggesting that the past was good, rather just that the present is worse.
Also, a caveat is that I'm not saying it was a better/nicer/more fulfilling experience doing frontend development in the past (e.g. IE <7), but rather that developers put in more effort, were more considerate, and generally achieved what little they managed to achieve within (what would today be considered) severely restricted environments, with far fewer resources / tools at their disposal.
Whether the output of that work was a better product is debatable, but I don't think it's untrue that devs did more with less (and when I say "more", I don't mean mean bloat).
This is it. Not only were web developers much more "bothered" with putting actual effort into trying to produce a considered product in the past, they did so without the tooling we take for granted today.
Half the projects I've worked on recently use contexualised i18n wrappers to process and output strings, or an equivalent custom generic React component, or similar. How simple would it be to add `lang=""` support to such a workflow, compared to what would have been involved in doing this 10 years ago (I'm aware this might seem exaggeration as 10+ years ago we still had similar stuff with gettext, et al—still used today by even Wordpress—but I'm more talking about recent changes to tooling-oriented frontend web development, which should in theory have made this type of stuff a lot easier).