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Notes -
The 90's/early 2000's were might be better compared to now, at least when restricting ourselves to social factors like "social cohesion" or "expectation of the typical person that they'll get married and start a family," but that doesn't make it peak. You're still dealing with sky-high divorce rates (that only "recover" due to declining marriage rates - the early 2000s are debatably the beginning of "inceldom" as an actual trend, and not just a one-off thing you might experience only once or twice in your life). You have to go way back, arguably pre-Industrial Revolution, for that
I see no indication that nostalgia for the time - either by younger Gen X or older Millenials reminiscing on their youth, or by younger Gen Z/early Alpha exposed to 90's/00's pop culture by their parents - is driven by regret that being an International Man of Mystery is harder now. Everything I see points to (a misguided) belief that things were more optimistic then.
Also, wasn't the 90s the time when cocaine use swapped for heroin use?
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My nostalgia comes from the fact that childhood set the bar at things like family, cartoons, playgrounds, and succeeding at educational challenges. Then those things all changed rapidly and I had no framework on what to do and tried filling the void with memberberries and creative writing failures. I want to go on unfocusedly for several paragraphs, but that'd probably just reenforce it.
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