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Be careful not to prove too much here. If all nostalgia is just based on one's subjectively biased viewpoint and is never grounded in anything objective, then that would imply that nothing ever gets objectively worse for anyone. But that can't be true. Sometimes the past actually was just better.
There's something about vaporwave that's deeply resonant for me. I was a small child in the 90s, but I do still have a number of distinct memories of those years.
I do think that vaporwave captures something essential about the dreamlike quality of those years (as I experienced them). You might naturally respond with, well, all of your experiences are a bit more dreamlike when you're a small child. And you'd be right. Although, if we want to analyze things in terms of "objective material conditions", the 80s and 90s presented a very brief and very unique window when consumer computing technology was becoming widely available, but technology (and the world at large) hadn't yet been thoroughly demystified by the infinite free information we have available on wikipedia/youtube/LLMs/etc. The computer was like a portal to another dimension, filled with bright promises of the future; there could be anything in there. If the kids on the playground told you that you could unlock Mew in Pokemon RBY, and you didn't have internet at home, you really had no way of knowing if they were telling the truth or not except for just exploring the game yourself. Part of what vaporwave is trying to evoke is the early mystique and promises of consumer technology, and the failure of those utopian promises to materialize.
As you were intimating, part of what vaporwave is trying to accomplish is to get you to construct your own nostalgic relationship to the past, rather than simply accurately presenting the 90s as they actually were. Listening to Floral Shoppe alone in your room? Kind of whatever. Listening to Floral Shoppe while walking around the dead mall 20 minutes down the street from the house where you grew up, where you used to spend so much time with your parents when you were little, virtually the only person in the whole building in the waning hours of a Saturday evening in August, a once vibrant shopping center full of families and children, now almost abandoned, every shop boarded up except for the GNC which is the final holdout? One of the most ethereal and otherworldly experiences I've ever had.
I basically only listen to polular music from the very late 70s to 1990 or so. The catch: I only started doing so in my early 30s. I didn't really listen to music seriously until in my late teens at which point I started with metal and then classic rock and prog from the late 60s / early 70s. If the "we get stuck to what was popular when we were teens / young adults" actually applied, I'd be listening to completely different music than what actually I listen to.
Anything made after 1990 is tainted by either what they now call r'n'b (aka ”urban contemporary”), rap / hiphop or grunge influences or is generic shitty pop or EDM slop and I’ve always detested all of those. I can take any number of pop hits (as in actual ”pop” genre, not just pop rock) from the 80s like Madonna, Michael Jackson, A-Ha, Duran Duran, Phil Collins etc and they still sound massively better than any pop music made since. I’ll even take what would now be considered ”B-list artists” like Bananarama any day over any modern popular music.
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