I think people’s problem with IE came much later, after MS had used its monopoly in the operating system market to establish IE as a monopoly in the browser space, to then freeze it as IE6 for years and years.
With IE6 so dominant, even mandated for most people (with ActiveX being the de facto bypass to IE/HTML4 limitations), web designers assumed its universality and stopped caring about anything else, practically contributing to the stagnation of the web standards around an obsolete and suboptimal Implementation.
The better, faster, more compliant and innovative browsers had no chance of dislodging IE, while a growing number of decreasingly tech savvy users could see (from the experience of Firefox and Opera mostly) how bad they had it with IE and how much behind it had fallen.

Yep, the web was a mess back then (still is, tbh), but the hatred for IE/MS is deserved, and comes back with a sour taste as we are witnessing the same thing all over again (just in slower motion).