I recall women heavily disliking it back then, but I also recall that people in general viewed the internet as just full of weirdos and creeps. Internet wasn’t mainstream, by any stretch of the imagination, so I think it likely “got swept under the rug” because of a general feeling of “who cares what weirdos do online? We’re real people and we never use the internet because we have lives.”

Also, fewer lawyers understood the tech at the time, or how to figure out who was producing these images, and how to prosecute them. So I’d wager that part of going after them was held back by tech-unsavvy lawyers who were like “What’s happening where and how? Dowhatnow? Can you FAX it to me?”