I don't think there was ever a golden age of typography either. Before buying the Kindle in 2017 I was only reading paper books. Sometimes I was positively impressed by the typography of a book, sometimes I didn't like it at all but mostly I didn't even notice it. And anyway: I knew I couldn't change anything.
It started with hyphenation (Amazon's advanced typography): a book with advanced typography was without it and on the 6" screen of the Kindle it bothered me. I went crazy at first, then I realized I had to learn a little of css. And then I started noticing other things...
But I don't want to transform my preferences into rules for everybody. They will continue to produce "terrible"
ebooks and I will continue to modify them before reading...