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I am not sure why you say that, nothing stops a developer from opening notepad and building a website. One of the wonderful things about the web is it's backwards compatibility.

It's just that there's better tooling available for you to build it faster/featureful now.

Exactly. So many comments here are acting as if they're forced to use npm+react+tailwind+etc. but you're absolutely not. Web standards (querySelector, fetch, display:flex, ...) are so far along compared to a decade ago that you could use zero libraries/frameworks and be significantly more produtive than we were back then.

Web standards still have a long way to go, but it's comical to claim that things have gotten harder.

> Today you have to research a pile of unnecessarily complicated (for most personal projects) frontend frameworks, libraries, and build systems, figure out the compiling and development environments, figure out a complex mess of containers and virtualization, etc, etc, etc.

Well yeah, but once you've learned the modern paradigms, you can get right back into hacking away in your text editor. I've been doing web development stuff for longer than 15 years or so, and it's no more difficult to start a project now than it was back then. I can run a single command to create a template nextjs project and be hacking away in no time at all. Yeah there's a learning curve initially, and for certain use cases you may not want or need these modern tools, but it's no different than when all that time ago I finally, after much foot-dragging and moaning, I finally learned CSS and transitioned away from "tables for everything" HTML I'd learned on Geocities, which seemed like the pinnacle of productivity at the time.

The way you described building a simple website (text editor only) works just as well today.

You need the frontend frameworks, build processes and million NPM dependencies only when working inside of a developer team for an enterprise software of some sort.

Do you really have to? I'm still building sites front-end with mostly HTML, CSS and jQuery or even vanilla JS.