Web Development in recent years has made being an infrequent Web developer unnecessarily complex, to the point that only frequent developers can perform tasks
Absolutely, I tend to stay away from web development, but when I have to do it it's just seems so unecessarily complex and painful.
Only if you are using the latest hipster JS framework. I write only vanilla JS (infrequently) and things have been getting easier and easier as browsers (and JS) advance.
Same approach here.
Server side rendering with Java and .NET web stacks, with vanila JS.
jQuery seems to be an underrated gem. It's just as good as 10 years ago.
It's not that it is underrated, the paradigm has moved past manually grabbing bits of the DOM and updating them. Today, it is all about two way databinding. You have a variable that lives in your controller and when he is updated so is the DOM, automatically. I'm glad jQuery has been put to pasture because you end up writing way less code which is way more maintainable.
What's a good field for an infrequent developer to become a frequent one? It seems all web dev companies expect even people applying for junior positions to be frequent developers (e.g. practiced at churning out REST APIs)