With the exception of music, which I thought it was a spectacular decade for, I agree. When this question comes up for every decade besides this one, I can usually answer right away, but for the '90s, I always struggle a bit.
Did the '90s have a phenomenon, i.e. like the '70s had Star Wars, the '80s had Indiana Jones, the '00s had Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, the '10s had the MCU? I'm not sure if it did. You could sort of argue that it was Pixar, but they came along in the latter half of the decade and you could roll those movies up with the Disney blockbusters, which had been mainstays at the top of the box office for a very long time. There's another argument to be made for Tarantino making indie movies mainstream, but I wouldn't call that a phenomenon-level breakthrough.
But anyway, enough '90s bashing.
All good points.
Honestly, I have said many, many times to people, particularly before the 80s revival that has gone on the last few years, but there is good music made in every decade, it's not like people just forget how to write songs, but of all the decades since, say the 1920s, I find the 90s the least interesting, musically and probably artistically in general, overall. Again, not to say that there wasn't good and even some great music, but when I think of the dawn of Rock and Roll in the '50s, its revolutionary offspring of the 1960s, the artistic greatness all over the place of the 1970s, the inventiveness and complete break from the past of the 80s, I don't really have anything for the 2000s without reviewing it, and now the 2010s is so much the time of great music that has always had to live underground finding its way past the record industry due to technology, the 90s just bore me to tears. The commercialization of hip-hop was particularly painful and I don't think hip-hop has ever really recovered. Rock finally died after its last gasp with Grunge. Bro-rock became a thing. Backstreet Boys, Spice Girls, Celine Dion, NSync, LeeAnn Rimes, Color Me Badd, Shania Twain, Brittney, et al., reclaimed and galvanized the airwaves with easily reproducible mass-market Pop for the Big Record Industry and we have never recovered from that as the top Pop artists today are direct extensions of that group, with little to no inventiveness or originality. Everything good we have today seems to be like the musical version of the French Underground fighting against Nazi occupation.
The 90s, to me, were the death of music (not without some great musicians and occasional great music) that real artists since have had to fight and claw their way through the legacy of just to be heard.