I think maybe they are just referring to the fact that in that era pretty much everyone had to build their own "framework" to get a big web app up, because there weren't a lot of established choices.
I didn’t play in the Java space back then but there were plenty of Java frameworks (https://dzone.com/articles/what-serverside-java-web-framewor...)
Ruby on Rails was released in 2005.
Knockout JS was introduced in 2010.
Django was released in 2005.
There was also Mojolicous for Perl also released in 2008.
The things I've seen. shudders