What stops you from creating the most simple html page and playing with CSS? That counts as programming to me, there's also scratch for people who are completely new and want to learn.
Today you "gotta" install node, yarn, webpack, react. Then you gotta make a package.json and configure webpack. Or replace webpack with something called "crap". At least that's what all the "for beginners" tutorials that everyone recommends says! Nobody ever said I could just use notepad!!!
But that's not exclusive for frontend.
20 years ago you'd get a random server with Perl. Probably free. 10 years ago you'd get a random server with PHP. You would use FTP and notepad to learn the ropes.
Today you must install some advanced editing software with some plugins, use a terminal, install some runtime or compiler, get some packages, which won't work, so Google tells you to use "sudo" so it works, but that's very suspicious. Stack Overflow says shouldn't be "sudoing" by the way, this is dangerous, you should actually install this "version manager" thing here to install the first tool you installed, so maybe uninstall the first tool, although there's no uninstaller. Oh, and you need this "package manager" tool that install the version manager in the first place. Then you gotta learn to deploy. At this point you're already too old for this shit.
Desktop apps? Good luck with that.
OF COURSE there are simpler solutions, like just making a website with HTML as you could before, or Jupiter Notebooks. But few people today will stumble on that by accident.
Now the scope of what a webpage is capable of is infinitaly larger, and so is the complexity required for using all the new possibilities. If you want to use advanced stuff without learning the basics, than of course you're going to have a bad time.
Yes, I agree. That's exactly what I said in several parts of my message. However I believe you missed the point and didn't notice the sarcastic tone.
Now there are like 50 ways to import JS code, most of them don't work most places, a lot of the code itself won't work in a browser at all (node-only), and a great deal of it is a pain to get into a browser if you're not fully bought into Node and probably also serving the whole "app" from Node.
It's about as easy to write your own JS in a browser, now, but it's vastly harder to start using code from the overall JS ecosystem.
... except you can literally make desktop and mobile applications now by "playing with css and html"! ^electron -- shudder!^
Part of the reason for the JS mess (which people have been bitching about for years and years) is how easy it is to dip your toes into. Match that with how easy it is to create a "gui" now with HTML and CSS, stir in an endless bunch of half-baked support libraries built by people that just learned JS last month and you get the perpetual hell of the JS ecosystem.
And now that it has been adopted by startups and traditional companies, it is here to stay for a while.
Half of my development time when dealing with a new JS project is un-fucking some JS dependency that I never wanted that lives deep in the bowels of npm_modules.
However, If you're referring to 2012 as back in the day, visual basic was by far and away completely deprecated by that point, if anything people would've been using Visual Studio community edition to do net programming and maybe visualbasic.net