[adventured]

Yes, there was extremely wide discussion in 1999 and 2000 about the dotcom party being typically somewhere between fraudulent and a giant bubble. The Buffett side of traditionalists won that argument, by a landslide. In the end, profits mattered, sales mattered, and something a lot closer to a traditional valuations model won out.

There was common discussion about junk dotcoms like TheGlobe.com, DrKoop.com, Geocities and dozens of others, and how they had no actual sustainable business (and often no plan for when they'd develop one). Scient, Viant, Razorfish, MarchFirst, and dozens of dotcom service companies were granted crazy valuations versus existing traditional peers (which is history rhyming re Ripple vs PayPal/Stripe/Square/Ant/etc).

The high burn rates, the lack of business models to actually make money, some that went public with practically no plans for how they'd make money at all, extremely high valuations on the few that were making money, and so on. These things were all very widely discussed, many skeptics were shouting about it, it wasn't popular to give them TV talking time (channels/sites like CNBC et al have a vested interest in pushing exuberence).