It said simple web pages, not web apps. Web apps that use APIs are basically in the same boat as a phone app. Constantly moving API target and platform requirements ever changing.
I feel like there is a category error here where people think a website is the HTML that lands in your browser. When actually it is also the technology that received your request and sent the HTML. Even if it’s the same “flat” HTML sitting on the server, a web application is still sending it. And yes, those require maintenance.
It's not a dichotomy though. If you build with cutting edge platforms, you'll suffer churn as things change underneath you. It's a choice you should make with awareness, but there's no right answer.
I prefer stable mature platforms for professional settings, because you can focus on the business problems and not the technology problems. It's the more fiscally responsible choice as well, given lower platform churn means less work that has no direct business value.
Not to mention things like the whole 32->64bit transition that dropped all previous iOS apps (and on the MacOS side of things, we've had 4x of those in the past 25 years - classic->OSX, powerpc->intel, 32->64bit, intel->M series)
The major platform transitions are harder breaks but are pretty rare. We’re not going to another architecture shift or bit increase for a long time.
Really? How come half of the apps I've used in the past are listed in the app store as "not compatible with this device, but they can be installed on $device_gone_to_rest_in_drawer_14_years_ago"?
I'm genuinely curious! I thought it was aggressive deprecation of mobile OS APIs that made old apps no longer work on new phones.
I mean, I guess the death of Flash / Java Applets / ActiveX / etc count, but in the javascript world, doesn't feel like we've actually had that many breaking changes