For more fun diving into this topic, I can recommend a famous old presentation called the "Everything you Never Wanted to Know about PKI but were Forced to find out", and godzilla crypto tutorial written by the same author (Peter gutmann). The certificates in browsers has had a long history of problems and ill designs. People did not like them, and they definitively did not like them when they caused major issues.
I’m not sure what you’re basing that on but every claim is the opposite of my experience back then. Even in the 90s it was expected that you used HTTPS for any site selling things, for example, as the credit card companies would block a business who let numbers go over the network in plaintext.
Early on there were concerns about performance but that was mostly over by the turn of the century for all but large file transfers. The primary drawback was the cost of a certificate back then.
It should also be mentioned here that credit card numbers as a security token has actually slowly been phased out in favor of other forms of payment systems online, and many banks today implement additional security requirement if you pay with a credit card. Black market with stolen CC numbers, despite https use by web stores, used to be one of the biggest issues with the internet, so even with all the stores using https it wasn't a solution to that problem.
I remember people talking about performance issues with https until the early 2010. "Every single micro second slower means reduced sales" was something people was very concerned about. I even heard it from people during an IETF meeting. It was talked in similar tone to how people today talk about SEO.
Everything you Never Wanted to Know about PKI but were Forced to Find Out:
<http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/pkitutorial.pdf>
Godzilla Crypto Tutorial:
