I will
not call you an ahole because you're at least conceding that you may be wrong about web development not being "meaty." Let's see if I can argue that there is indeed meat in web development.
Let's look at your "tired problems." "Interface with a database." Yep. Hey, which database? Do you use the tired and true MySQL? Do you trade up to Postgres's improved features in exchange for possibly reduced compatibility? Do you do NoSQL like all the cool kids? Great, now which NoSQL database? Will your app really benefit from it? Okay, you picked a database; do you write SQL directly, or use a pre-built database layer/ORM of some sort? If the former, do you know how to escape your arguments and make sure you're not inviting injection exploits? Do you know how to write efficient queries that will touch as few database rows as possible? If the latter, will it hide needed capability from you or behave much slower than using straight SQL? What are the trade-offs? Do you perhaps use specialty databases like Solr for search or Redis for key-value storage in addition to your main one? Is the increased complexity worth the potential speed or flexibility increases? Can you make sure queries to those databases are secure too?
Or "handling user accounts." Oh my God, okay. Do you let people sign up with usernames? Just email addresses? Do you allow multiple accounts with the same email address? If someone has signed up with the username "Helen" (with an ell), do you let someone else sign up as "He1en" (with a one) or "He|en" (with a pipe) and possibly impersonate them? How do you store the password? No, that's wrong. No, that's also wrong. How do you let people reset their password if they forget it? Oh, wow, that's very wrong! Are you storing credit card numbers or addresses or other personal information? How do you do user permissions, so some user accounts have administration permissions that others don't? How do you avoid XSS exploits that might allow an unprivileged user from taking over an administrator account? What if you want someone who's between a normal user and an administrator who has some edit privileges but can't take down the whole site?
Okay, got all that worked out? Okay, now make it respond in 200ms or less from all points in the world. And compliant with these government regulations the client is just now telling you about two weeks before the scheduled launch. And also look and work the same in Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, five different strains of Arabic, and, most cruelly, German, whose long words bring many unprepared web designers to tears. And on mobile.
Granted, many devs will work with a framework or CMS that helps solve some of these issues for us, but even then we need to understand the inner workings of that system and what the trade-offs are in order to truly exploit it.