It still sucks. The target environment is undefined. In most programming problems we start with with a well defined target environment (or at least the language semantics are well defined and we quickly learn where the platform-specific hacks are).
In web programming each of the browsers is slightly different in about a hundred different ways. The main goal of using the web (presenting a platform independent UI without needing to download native code) is not entirely achievable. Instead, each year we apply slightly different hacks to go around in circles.
Is this actually true? There are stable, well-tested shims for just about everything out there. CSS strikes me as the only tricky bit, but generally if IE8 users don't get to see an animation I don't really care.
Nope, that target environment is a responsive, standards compliant software. Code for the standards and the displaying devices will catch up.
On hobby projects I support only standards. Your browser not to spec? Not my problem. Well, it would be my problem, due to less traffic from people with broken browsers, but I don't monetize or track my traffic.
Professionally, I'm over here supporting IE8 and Safari 5 (the last version available to Windows) still. Next year we'll finally be dropping IE (all versions) so only a few more months to go.
Unfortunately if something is broken in Chrome or Firefox - I get to fix it. Then when the browser finally fixes it - I get to go fix it by removing the old fix which now breaks things. Really unproductive but I can't argue against it.
At least browser vendors do try to conform to some common specs and any deviation from the spec can be bridged using JavaScript libraries.
Without browsers as a target you might find yourself supporting ancient Android versions and Windows XP.
Most non-trivial systems require several contributors. 'Professional' means among other things being able to work with others.
"When working with others, different ideas and opinion clash heavily."
Sounds like herding cats. Any complex system should have a technical lead/architect who actually has the authority to say which technologies will be used. It does not mean he shouldn't discuss this with others - but the fact that there is one authority in the end simplifies things.
The difference between then and now is that the end result now is 'distributed'.
I suppose you can dump everything to a text file.
I haven't used those much, just glanced over a system written in them. But that sounds bizarre: I thought the whole point of PHP was to be bland and mainstream. If you know how to program at all, then what is there to learn about it?
The reality is that one can drive the frontend with 100% javascript no frameworks, html, css, keep things simple avoid the framework nightmare. Use typescript if the project is large enough. How come people are not doing this? Because they are not putting in the time to learn the language, it's all about learning framework. I see the same in backends, people who know rails but not ruby, laravel but not not enough php, android framework but not enough java. This is the problem.