I think the opinions on the linked page are likely to be split across age lines. If you were active on the internet prior to 2004 sites like this one will spark nostalgia in many, however, if your primary experience with the internet starts with the iPhone, Facebook, etc then you will merely see poor design and ugly aesthetics. I'm sure this is somewhat reductive, but broadly I would suspect I'm correct.
It has nothing to do with that, it's just bad design to have pattern image backgrounds that make text hard to read and add nothing.
There's a reason even small web pages don't look like this any more. Pages made like this were people seeing features and thinking they should use them without thinking about what they were doing. Go back as far as you want, professional pages never looked like this.
Even in the days of geocities it was only people's first web pages that looked like this. You could excuse people for learning to put a .gif in the background and then showing it off in the mid 90s. 30 years later there isn't any excuse.
As a person that's closer to 40 then 30, i love the design of that webpage. It makes me feel young again. I understand that it's technically bad. I understand that there are many ways to make it feel more readable.
I don't care. I miss a time when nobody knew or cared about how to design a readable webpage.
