As I have written before, I like how a monospace, "typewritten", look gives a certain "straight from the lab" feel to the content. On the other hand, as you say, going to great lengths to imitate the effect of constraints which no longer apply is just silly. Maybe the "straight from the lab" look for the web is simply unstyled HTML. I always thought that was ugly without a good reason, because it can be styled to actually look good, but maybe the younger generations (who have not even seen a typewriter) think of it differently.