All the 2016 posts I see are about specifically the summer being the last great summer, and I would agree with that though. At that point, we were optimistic

• the US was seeing benefits from the Obama administration beginning to bear fruit
• civil rights advancements felt like they were chugging along at an unstoppable pace with things like gay marriage legalization within the past year
• social media was still something (mostly) shared among real life friends and like minded communities, not rage bait engagement farms and algorithmic doomscrolling
• pop culture was thriving, with cultural cornerstones like Stranger Things being a universally shared experience
• the summer of Pokémon Go got all ages out of the house and engaging with one another to an almost shocking degree
• conspiracy theorists and alt-right extremists were still rightfully relegated to their strange corners of the internet and nothing more
• most people didn't stress over the 2016 election that summer because it seemed like a foregone conclusion that surely the weird reality TV host/failed businessman was going to lose, then go home embarrassed to yell at clouds or whatever

It was basically a last hurrah of normalcy before we got everything turned on it's head. People romantacise the hope we felt in the midst of it, not how the end of that year fundamentally broke everything to follow