People used to make websites by uploading some php or perl scripts to a shared server (or just buying a domain and pointing it at their home ip). In that context, I can't imagine someone writing an article like this.
I built a forum/social site that way back in the day and it was active and profitable for 10+ years.
It also feels like the art of optimization has been lost.
For small and medium sites a lot of today's crazy build pipeline and distributed asset hosting complexity can be sidestepped if you just focus on optimization and making sure that cache expiration dates for your assets are set correctly.
On the server side, it is considered "normal" these days to have maybe 50+ database queries per request. People then reach for expensive and complex database solutions (clustering, etc) before doing simple app-layer optimizations like caching.
* Serverless - in that you don't need to do server admin
* Online IDE - CPanel lets you make changes online to your code
* Continuous Integration - When you save the file online it is in immediate production
* Branching - you can copy a folder from one subdomain folder to another - this effectively gives you a poor man's git and environments in one swoop!
It is like a REPL of web dev. Nothing can come close to it, because once you made your changes they are live, there is no infuriatingly slow publishing step.