CSS has become much easier. CSS grids and flexbox have removed all the stupid layout hacks from long ago. No more need for HTML tables to get two elements to align. The CSS spec has also improved a lot.
JS has also improved massively, though it can't rid itself of its original flaws it has solved a lot of problems in fifteen years.
Accessibility has become trivial. You really don't need all that much knowledge about screen readers anymore. If you follow the standard even just a little, screen readers will already Just Work.
HTTP/3, WebP, Brotli, and a whole range of technologies have made some of the worst pain points of web development go away for free. No more messing around with connection pipelining, ordering resources to work around the browser load order, minifying text resources manually, you just let the tech stack do its thing and it'll work fine.
The problem isn't the web stack, it's the framework of the week throwing out the last five years of development as "bloat", redefining how things Should Be, and then growing to a form where it's considered "bloat" and replaced again.
I've started my web dev career with PHP on the server. It's really not that bad. The web works fine.
Things that work fine are boring, though. Writing HTML and wiring basic actions to it is tedious work when there are all of these interesting frameworks and methodologies to try out.
Or, in some cases, people skip the basics and start with learning React or another heavy Javascript framework. Who needs to know the difference between a <nav> and a <div class="nav"> when you only have two weeks to get through the bootcamp?
It's really not all that difficult to make websites. Web apps are even easier because you can demand Javascript and all of its tooling to be present.
We've tried replacing the web with apps on phones. As it turns out, that's just as hard, often even harder. The actual problems that make web development hard just aren't easy problems to solve. Throwing complex layers of other people's code over them sometimes helps, but in most cases anything that promises to make web development easy just moves the complexity some place else.
JS has also improved massively, though it can't rid itself of its original flaws it has solved a lot of problems in fifteen years.
Accessibility has become trivial. You really don't need all that much knowledge about screen readers anymore. If you follow the standard even just a little, screen readers will already Just Work.
HTTP/3, WebP, Brotli, and a whole range of technologies have made some of the worst pain points of web development go away for free. No more messing around with connection pipelining, ordering resources to work around the browser load order, minifying text resources manually, you just let the tech stack do its thing and it'll work fine.
The problem isn't the web stack, it's the framework of the week throwing out the last five years of development as "bloat", redefining how things Should Be, and then growing to a form where it's considered "bloat" and replaced again.
I've started my web dev career with PHP on the server. It's really not that bad. The web works fine.
Things that work fine are boring, though. Writing HTML and wiring basic actions to it is tedious work when there are all of these interesting frameworks and methodologies to try out.
Or, in some cases, people skip the basics and start with learning React or another heavy Javascript framework. Who needs to know the difference between a <nav> and a <div class="nav"> when you only have two weeks to get through the bootcamp?
It's really not all that difficult to make websites. Web apps are even easier because you can demand Javascript and all of its tooling to be present.
We've tried replacing the web with apps on phones. As it turns out, that's just as hard, often even harder. The actual problems that make web development hard just aren't easy problems to solve. Throwing complex layers of other people's code over them sometimes helps, but in most cases anything that promises to make web development easy just moves the complexity some place else.