What you're referring to as the stepping stone is the terminology.
You know very well that people in our field like big words and big terms - full stack developer, machine intelligence, leaky bucket algorithm, graph query language, functional programming, aspect oriented programming - just to name a few.
If we gave easy-to-understand names to everything, what would marketing do? :)
What you call as generalist can be interpreted as someone who can't use tools proficiently or produce high-code quality.
> So where do you get your definition of 'full stack'? Pls show me.
It's something we used in the earlier days of internet do describe someone who's capable of producing usable user interface sprinkled with some javascript that basically works and create db that accepts the data you insert via some kind of form that php/python/ruby processed.
It was basic "bragging" rights in the beginning, it meant "look, my thingy looks good and I made all of it myself, I Installed server software, hacked up CSS, HTML, wrote serverside code and inserted all of it in a DB".
Context: plot happens at news groups, circa 1999.
The name, along with people, evolved. There's no concrete definition. You can tell, since you assumed "full stack" means A and to me it means B.
One who can take a web-based project and create it from 0 too 100% = full stack, as it takes the full stack of tools relating to backend and frontend to complete.
> That's called generalists. That's me (web stuff excepted). I'm good at that. Why not call them that?
I don't know. I never liked the term full-stack and I met plenty of people who claimed the title but what they had to show for didn't fit the title they claimed.
> So what does it mean to talk about 'full stack' then list a load of tech, as happens in job ads?
No idea honestly, I never take those seriously. People are unstable and not trustworthy, all you can trust are facts and facts are hard to come by when it comes to hiring. The tests are the only way to assert anything, and it's difficult to create such a test, let alone run it. It's not nice for sure.
I understand where you're coming from now. I don't pay too much mind to terminology, I learned years ago that a simple algorithm that any newcomer will discover has 50 different names. That alone tells me we like to reinvent the wheel and brag needlessly.