I remember using physical screens that only had 64 or even 40 columns. (A printout was more practical for reading anyway. Just tolerate a few minutes of dot-matrix noise.)
I think that more than the font being monospace it is that the font is a good font with high contrast rather than whatever thin and light gray font that many sites use to look fancy.
For +90% of web sites I read I only need a "fix font" for the body text and not a full "reader" version of the page.