It's debatable indeed. I'd still make the golden era later than 2000 and would say it definitely ended in or before 2014/15 at the latest when Google's web search got its big profit squeeze and (Google's, again, mostly) targeted ad prices went down such that long standing publications like Dr. Dobb's Journal gave up following BYTE in 2012, yielding to content farms and copycat sites. Furthermore, Google Reader was discontinued in 2013, which apparently was used a lot; for me personally RSS peaked in 2005-2010 but the RSS spec is from 1998 already. Speaking of "standards", there's a WHATWG-focussed timeline [1] starting with 2004 that may help to further pinpoint the begin of the end in the 2000s. Considering 2009 saw the break through of "HTML 5" oiled with lots of vulgar propaganda financed by big tech, all in all I'd say 2000-2010 feels about right to call the golden era. The responsive push following the 2007 iPhone launch made the web complicated and helped apps more than the web. Paradoxically, the best times happened to be when Ajax sites were nascent and used as progressive enhancement, but by 2008, when Chrome/v8 hit the scene big time, party was already over for end users (as opposed to entrepreneurs).
[1]: https://github.com/sideshowbarker/web-history