I think it is because the geeks "won". A lot of geeks found each other during the early web days. Nowadays it's not a stigma to be a geek. Everything is more mature and commercially integrated, including mopping up geek-ly minded people into commercial ventures. It's harder today to have an outsized impact from a bedroom and no budget. (Not in absolute numbers, how often this happens, but in relative terms! Many more people are at it nowadays, so some slip through with a run-away success from nothing.)
Not at all. As someone who lived through that: there was much less enthusiasm and acceptance around starting a business. It was seen as harder and the Internet was perceived as less of a sure thing.
You could argue there was more low-hanging fruit in terms of opportunity, but to anyone who was a product of the age, they weren't primed to see it. So the absolute amount of opportunity wasn't substantially different than it was before. Our mind plays tricks on us when we look into the past: "If I had known X, I could've done that." But, you didn't. And business is rife with survivor bias.
In the terms of too late to invent the wheel, sure, we can opine about not being that person all day and you'll always be correct. Unfortunately for you, there's more than that which makes the world we live in today and tomorrow.