In the early days the internet was a free, egalitarian space for anyone to surf. Now, commercial interests rule – but users do still have some control.
Gopher has many problems as a protocol. The original versions of HTTP had much the same problems, such as closing the connection at the end of a transfer rather than having a length header or a signal that the connection is actually done. HTTP went on to fix most of those problems, but Gopher never got the chance. Gopher+ started fixing it up, but it was a victim of bad timing. The Mosaic browser was released shortly after Gopher+ and everyone started switching over. To my knowledge, nobody has ever implemented Gopher+ on either a client or server. Not even after over 20 years of a "revival" movement.
Gemini intentionally limits things, such as not having inline images. This is supposed to be done to keep out methods that have been historically used to track users, but things don't work that way. I can just as easily send my logs to a data broker without using a pixel tracker if that's what I want to do.
In the end, you can just use HTTP with a static web page, zero cookies, and no JavaScript. That's what I ended up doing for my old blog (after offering a Gemini version for a while), including converting a bunch of YouTube <iframe> tags to linked screenshots so you don't even get YouTube cookies.