What has changed is micromanaging of daily standup which reshapes work into neat packages for conversation but kills a non linear flow and limits exploration making things exactly as requested instead of what could be better.
We now have containers that run in VMs that run on physical servers. And languages built on top of JavaScript and backed by Shadow Dom and blah blah. Now sure I could easily skip all that and stick a static page on a cdn that points to a lambda and call it a day. But the layers are still there.
I'm afraid only more of this is coming with AI in full swing and fully expect a larger scale internet outage to happen at some point that will be the result of a subtle bug in all this complexity that no single person can fix because AI wrote it.
There's too much stuff in the stack. Can we stop adding and remove some of it?
A CGI script, even, which Lambda is the cloudified version of.
There are still people who do that at smaller companies, but you wouldn't call them a webmaster anymore.
In fairness as well, the frontend tooling landscape has become so complex that while I'm capable of jumping in, I am in no way an efficient fronted developer off the rip.
I used to “make websites” in the 2000s, then stopped for about 15 years to focus on backend and infrastructure.
Have been getting back into front end the last few months — there was a good bit of learning and unlearning, but the modern web stack is amazingly productive. Next.js, Tailwind, and Supabase in particular.
Last time I checked in to frontend dev, CSS directives fit on an A4 sheet, valid XHTML was a nerd flex and rounded corners were painstakingly crafted from tables and gifs.
Frontend is a dream now :)
I'm only 36, but you're making me feel extremely old.
To me, "developers of the past" were the people working on COBOL and JCL and FORTRAN and DB2, on z/OS or System 390/370/360, to whom "RPG" was only a 4GL[1], not a type of game, and there was no webmaster or graphic designer involved... not some dotcom era dev in the 90s when "webmasters" became a widespread thing.
Here's an interesting article on webmasters and their disappearance below[2].
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG 2: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/postscript/what-happened-to-t...