I both pity and admire beginner web coders of today. Unlike me, they've not been able to accumulate gradual knowledge of HTTP, HTML, REST, JavaScript, the DOM, CSS, AJAX, JSON, asynchronous execution and event driven object oriented programming over a period of decades. They haven't walked the long path from CGI scripts to modern server side tomfoolery via PHP, ASP and various MVC frameworks. They're just brutally thrust into a complex world of Gulp, Grunt, TypeScript, React Hooks and MobX-State-Tree and it's assumed they somehow already know about all that other stuff. Computer Science has moved into the frontend in earnest and yet it still seems as if many view "web development" as "making homepages", and that it's something you can learn over a period of weeks, not years.

In retrospect, web development has always been a bit of a struggle against the powers that be.
Some things that were pretty bad for quite a long time have gotten better. But, on the whole, I dare say it's much worse now than when I started. Much like how Commodore 64 programmers could keep a map of the entire computer in their head, a moderately competent developer could churn out an acceptable web site in a matter of weeks, understand every single aspect of it and get paid in the process. If I, a quarter century ago, had possessed the experience and knowledge I do now, the simplicity of those early web pages would've felt surreal. And yet, we apparently provided a service that was of some value to some people. A digital commodity, nothing more, nothing less. Actually useful software.