What industry hasn’t changed tremendously since 2000? Look at Vulkan vs OpenGL 2. Or C++23 vs C++03. Or C# today vs C# in 2000. Or even Java today vs Java then. Or CPUs of today vs CPUs of 2000. Those gosh darned hardware engineers keep making this stuff overly complex!

I find it funny when people from other domains complain about web development changing so quickly, when literally every other domain changes at about the same pace. React has been around since 2013 now, that’s the same age as Rust. Of course if you’re not in the industry and actively following it, it will feel foreign to you if you revisit it in 10 years. That doesn’t mean your industry hasn’t changed, it just means you haven’t noticed it because you’ve been following it all this time.

And you can still use plain JS, HTML, and CSS. And a lot of things have gotten way better using vanilla tools. You don’t have to use a super complicated stack if you don’t want to.