The web didn't change; you did

While I do agree that it is still possible to use the "old" technology for web development, I don't agree that there is "no reason stopping you" from using them.

I'm a recent CS graduate. In my final year's project, I was working on a website using PHP on the backend. My advisor told me that I would fail if I didn't use anything "more advanced", so I had to learn and work on Laravel.

After college, I applied for a lot of jobs as a web developer, and every single on of them requested that I learn one or more front-end frameworks. I always show them some websites I made with pure HTML5-CSS-JS on the front end, and they seem to like them, but when they learn that no flashy framework was used, their tone changes.

So yeah, unless someone is able to rely entirely on freelancing or launching a startup, there are reasons stopping me from not using frameworks.

For smaller and internal project, the IDE's of yesteryear required less code and had a smaller learning curve to get decent UI's (and other CRUD features). They sometimes weren't esthetic, but they were practical and got the job done. The current web stacks are bloated, and waste busy work wiring together and debugging different layers.

Whenever I point out The Productivity Gap, people say, "Oh but now you have more choice!" True, but that choice has a dear cost. At many orgs too few use apps on phones such that catering to different screen sizes is a wasted effort. Maybe some end users need phone screens, but the operators and clerks behind the data generally don't.

I believe we need CRUD-friendly web standards, and more who are willing to say "no" to bloating stacks for every what-if. YAGNI still matters. Modern web stacks shot YAGNI in the back.

I actually think a lot of the things that were very difficult are much better now.

For browser incompatibilities we used to have to hand write CSS. We now can use normalizers and autoprefixer on build, including reading from a browserslist file, so it only includes what's necessary. Same thing for JS; instead of including a dozen hand written polyfills, babel-preset-env will only include what I actually need for the same browser target list.

People complain that now we need a while bundler, and that's correct, but it's a needed step. In reality, the easy things might have got a bit more complicated because you need an organized build instead of just a simple HTML, but the difficult things got way easier. And I'm ok with that.

> PHP and HTML (though I don't think I ever saw a time where those were treated as two things rather than one weird mash of the two in a single file)

There's (still) plenty of that out there. But this was literally the reason why the MVC paradigm was brought in to web dev from the GUI/windows (lower case w) world

Overly opinionated narrowly scoped, with a click bait title.

Of course the web has changed, someone of us have been around to remember the web before javascript. Before flash, before frameworks.

take this same argument an apply it to cars, sure you could get rid of fuel injection, automatic transmissions, airbags, seat belts, crumble zones, differentials, etc...

But who would want that car, could it remotely compete with modern cars?

I think you'll find the answer is both the same.

Porque no los dos?

Trends have changed and so have my preferences. It’s the same primitives but we’re allowed to change.