> These days the scope of frontend development has increased to the point where learning and staying on top of it has become too large (in my opinion) for most people to do while also becoming and staying highly competent in everything else.

I feel like frontend complexity is just a meme on HN to be honest. How complicated is it to learn a framework like React (which celebrated its 10 years 3 months ago) if you have a background in software engineering and some basic knowledge of HTML/JS? Like an afternoon to read the doc? 3 days to practice and be totally fluent? I managed graphic designers who knew nothing about computers but were able to learn React and be very productive. Then you pick one tool to build your production app. Yes there are many options, but you choose one (I use Vite.js) and stick with it for the next 5 or 10 years.

> A “full stack” developer these days is supposed to understand frontend development, backend development, systems administration, cloud operations, and what else? All of these are massive areas that are constantly shifting.

There is a new big thing every 10 years or so. Like the last one was Kubernetes and it almost 10 years old and you probably don't even need it. HTML5, ES6, React, Python, Django, SQL, Postgres, Docker, AWS, Terraform... all those tools have been there since almost forever (it feels like it) and mostly never changed. And you can build 99% of the web with that stuff.

As I said in another comment, yes it's a lot if you are a junior dev fresh out of college but you probably have some solid knowledge of all of that if you have been doing this for a very long time. At least enough understanding and experience to know what to google when you need to do something and what to do with what you found.