Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not the GP but have been building websites off and on since the 1994. Back in the 90s it was hacky, but the extent of those hacks were small enough that even hobbyists could memorise those edge cases. Whereas these days there are so many footguns and edge cases that even seasoned professionals find it impossible to memorise everything. The amount of trial and error it takes to build a modern site is immense. With…
> Back in the 90s it was hacky, but the extent of those hacks were small enough that even hobbyists could memorise those edge cases. You're either misremembering, or have some thick rose-tinted glasses on. The late 90s were times of the Wild West Web. Every browser had custom behaviour and rendered pages differently. JavaScript and CSS were still new, and it took years for the implementations to be standardized. Webs…
> The late 90s were times of the Wild West Web.
Or we are talking about different eras. I'm on about early 90s.
> Every browser had custom behaviour and rendered pages differently.
They did. But there was less of spec to have to concern yourself with. The biggest day to day differences was around frames (which was a pain in the arse) and tables (which was easy to work around).
> JavaScript and CSS were still new, and it took years for the implementations to be standardized.
You didn't need Javascript most of the time and CSS incompatibilities were easy to remember (I'm talking about cognitive overhead here)
> Even as late as 2005, projects like jQuery were needed to make web development easier.
That's in the region of 10 years after when I'm talking about. A completely different era. By that point the web had already turned into the shitshow it is now.
> I'd say that it wasn't until the late aughts, well after "web 2.0", that web development didn't feel hacky.
I couldn't disagree more. By that point people had Stockholm syndromed themselves into believing web technologies were actually good. But it wasn't.
> So I get the sentiment that modern web development is difficult, bloated and buggy
Its not a sentiment. It's a fact
> the good news is that the web is fully mature now,
No its not. We're just Stockholm syndromed into thinking its mature. But half the technologies we use are constantly churning. That's not the definition of mature.
> Web developers are spoiled with choice, so a hard task is simply selecting the right technologies to use.
The hard part is finding something that will still be around in 5 years time.
> or we inherit decade-old codebases that make maintenance a nightmare.
I've worked on plenty of decade-old codebases and I'd never rank web development in there precisely because of the aforementioned churn. Web tech goes out of date so quickly that it never gets to live past a decade...never mind multiple decades. It's simply not a mature platform to write software on despite what you claim.
> But it's never been easier to write plain HTML/CSS/JS that will work across browser
Who writes plain HTML and JS? There's so much bloat required to get anything to look modern that nobody writes plain web sites any longer (In fact I did for one of my open source projects and people hated it and rewrote it in Vue).
It was much easier to write plain HTML et al in the 90s. In fact that was exactly how web development back then was done.
> and deploy it as a static site that works reliably at massive scale
That's literally how sites were originally written. It's not a new invention ;) The web was intended to be a static collection of documents. What we've since done is tried to turn it into an application framework. And that's what it sucks at.
> If you need more features, then complexity can creep in, but it is possible to minimize failure points with good engineering.
Sure, but again this isn't a new invention. This was the case right from the inception of the web. It's just gotten a hell of a lot harder to do good engineering for the web.