Did VCs really remove the editing capability from the web?

AFAIK the restrictive nature at the time was a lack of web servers to store web pages on in an affordable way. If you werent a student with access to a home folder on a university server, or a rich entity able to afford your own T1 line, your hosting options for serving your pages and media were few and far between and expensive (about $30-50/monthly adjusted for inflation).

Thankfully offerings like Anglefire, Geocities, Hotmail provided for free services. It was either IE3 or IE4 that brought about asynchronous javascript and wysiwyg editors empowering non devs to make formatted HTML.

Id argue the masses gave up editing their own page layouts because of convenience provided by consistent views and content discovery.

We've never 100% lost Web 1.0 though. Its alive and still decentralized.