There is a massive advantage in being able to see the web tech stack for what it is and wielding it without over-engineering or fanaticism, while your competitors are spending 2-3x on monstrosities that essentially does the same thing, but slower.
If you walk into web dev with aggressive principles and a willingness to be controversial, you can get a lot of shit done and it will feel great. Watching others struggle under the various JS framework circuses has almost an opulent/aristocratic vibe in 2023.
At that level of abstraction it’s all just strings
Exactly... I worry about the masses learning of this and gaining literacy over the landed gentry.
PHP/CGI basically had it solved. I emulate PHP in .NET6 today using verbatim and interpolated string operations.