Why don't websites look like this anymore

A good part behind this design was HTML: At the time, the only way to do some page formatting was tables. Everything was tables, and tables inside tables. There was no CSS, so what you could play with was borders (color, thickness), column/row span of cells and cell padding.

Dad, geek, conversation liquidity provider. vrypan.net (home), /weatherxm (work), @l--o--l (fun). Also https://paragraph.xyz/@purplesubmarine

Made a website in about 1998, haven't touched it since 2000. It's still in constant use (although probably not the "download the entire site to store on a 1.44 MB floppy disk" feature)