Late Stage Capitalism

You've never gotten a BSOD on old versions of Windows?? My personal experience is that old versions of Windows (XP, 7) were much more unstable than new versions of Windows (10, 11).

Correct. I never had BSOD and I used XP for thousands of hours in the early 2000s. Mostly runescape, halo trial, neopets, dozens of various flash game sites, etc.
I actually saw my friend have it a couple times and I remember thinking how exotic the solid blue screen looked

Why would the golden age of "normie" consumer computing have taken place in the 2000s, when there were pop-up ads that gave you malware and adware toolbars?

uhhh because you can x them out? I never got malware or adware toolbars installed on my stuff it felt like "it just werkz" back then, and now it doesn't anymore. I don't even do anything more complex now, it's just internet surfing and some steam games. And discord. Discord also feels extremely laggy, like when you click on something it takes a full split second to switch chatrooms

The 25th percentile user today has literally never interacted with a hierarchical filesystem.

This is only true for zoomers and boomers right?

Regardless of the windows stuff it extends to phones too. Smart-ish phones from before 2012 never gave me problems, while today's smartphones brick often and even while working, sometimes feel randomly laggy in a way the old phones never did. I have no idea what's going on but it feels like the software is just so built up and strung out that it's like a house of cards impromptu stuck together with superglue