In the 90’s and 00’s there was a photographic movement to take photographs with more depth using more hand and arm movement to make more dynamic images. Some say it came from comic book artists and others say it started as everyone doing the double thumb and index finger as a ergatz frame gide of what you were about to film, but this time you were the subject.
Anyways it got popular so people with cheap cameras and phone cameras started propping them up and trying to do some of it and most of the time they didn’t have enough time to get their hands right. So they started to take all these pictures of themselves with weird hands and people started doing it on purpose, and then photographers picked up on the trend.
In the late mid to late 90’s they had cameras and video cameras on what we would now refer to as ‘Dumbphones’. I was born between the Summer of Love and the original Woodstock. Those were my 20’s and 30’s. They had cameras. Not great cameras. Not all of them but enough of them. BTW I worked in IT and studied WAP and online multimedia formats as part of my training.
And something else you are forgetting is the trend was on blog like sites before blogging was a thing. People didn’t expect high quality images because they took forever to download. Often people also used crappy pocket cams and videos from cheap video cameras. But most people think phones when you say selfies these days, but they often used digital snapshot cameras and then imported them to the PC and shunk them down to Internet size. However AIUI the movement were based on camera focused dumbphones.
You don’t want to believe it fine. No skin off my nose.