Trismegistus

Sure, but it was my experience, which is really the only one I can speak to. I also found that there was far more "gleeful chaos to be approached with sharp knives" after I got back online in the early aughts...and it's grown progressively less gleeful since. Early fandom was wonderfully weird: stuff that these days would get flamed for OOCness/canon-noncompliance or Twitter dogpiled for being supposedly unhealthy was just "fic," and authors were more concerned with caveating that they didn't own the characters or source material than anything else.