It's weird isn't it. Though I look back fondly on even the weirder 90s stuff, just because it's the decade I grew up in. There's always good and bad sides to everything - some brilliant music in the 90s, but also some awful dross. Ditto TV.
Honestly, I think 1990s car design hit more than it missed. I know American makers had a bit of a poor reputation in the 1990s, but looking back I actually prefer a lot of the ultra-curvy 90s shapes to the modernised but more bland shapes that arrived in the next decade.
Elsewhere there were some obvious hits. 1990s Japanese cars were generally quite attractive I think, and not just the obvious high-performance stuff, but aesthetically the fairly normal cars were pretty good too - think K11 Micra, EG Civic, Mazda Lantis/323. Europe obviously had some high points - some imaginative and very pretty Alfas, Renault had a style renaissance, BMW was generally sharp, almost every Peugeot looked great, Fiat had some fantastic stuff... hell, even Rover produced some cars that were both attractive and competitive.
I think a lot of it stems from the confluence of factors that also make cars from that era quite good to drive, i.e. modern enough to be usable by 2019 standards, but with many of the sensibilities of earlier decades in terms of size, weight etc. In design terms that means curves and neat details, but also good proportions and relatively little visual flab.
Also, I think I've talked about this elsewhere, but in retrospect the 1990s seems like quite an optimistic decade. People were looking forward to a new millennium, the internet was fresh and new, tech was getting cheap, and there was the kind of blissful ignorance you had from not living in the post-9/11 era. The last few decades have been defined by war, terrorism, recessions and divided politics, and the fact you can't get away from it because of social media...
