You'd have had a hard time coding the web 30 years ago, given that it hadn't been invented yet; but 20 years ago, Perl was about as productive as something like Python or Ruby today[1]; a web server, after all, just provides stateless RPC. What was missing was a lot of frameworks that could permit a developer ecosystem to grow, a developer ecosystem being something that lets your more easily reuse things other people wrote. Developer ecosystems with critical mass are what increase productivity, rather than technological improvements.

[1] Technically, I think common web frameworks aren't particularly productive, because they are built around a very low common denominator. I worked on a CRUD app framework in the early 2000s that would still blow something like Rails out of the water in terms of productivity.