Web is not dead simple (I consider web to be frontend development in this context). Why I would consider web to be hard: - it is harder to do frontend development than backend, because you write code which is sent to one of thousand different compilers, creating another layer of difficulty. Versus controlled environment where your backend code is being run - While there are only few patterns which are applied to FE development, there are many new features(PWAs, real time syncs,..) coming into web. Taking advantage of them requires learning, coding and refactoring. You might say - this is just reinventing the wheel - while partly that is true, developers will still need to learn, adapt knowledge to web, build tools.