This is something I've struggled with. When I think of introducing people to web development I think about how I got my start - creating a website to display pictures of my newborn daughter in 1997. Only, who would do such a thing these days? People would just post those to Facebook or Instagram. Creating a web app is too much too soon in my opinion. What is a good project that has relevance in 2018, but doesn't require anything more than vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS?

> Only, who would do such a thing these days?

I would. The corporate sites you mention are cumbersome and detrimental.

Yes, creating a web app is too much, and so is a project, in my opinion. A web document is all that might be needed:

  <html><head><title>website</title></head>
  <body><img src="newborn.png"></body></html>

Isn't that overkill as well? Not sure on the current state of ftp support but I think firefox still allows ftp browsing. We had protocols and programs dedicated to sharing stuff like this before we put them behind commercial walls.

A marketing landing page is a good example.

A lot of web development curriculum these days tends to focus on writing apps with JavaScript, or learning a new library. HTML/CSS is still taught, but I feel the “HTML is not a real language” sort of drives people away.

A big difficulty is that HTML by itself doesn't give you good ways to define templates so it's a pretty dreadful task.

Web components can change that in the future but until that it's pretty normal for developers to opt for tools that allow for creating a HTML fragment and building up HTML in another language.

Imagine if we had to do the c calling convention song and dance on every function call...

There are plenty of simple templating options still out there. Twig, handlebars, and jekyll would all be good introductions in my opinion

geocities simply made it "free" to publish on the web I thought? As opposed to being a platform that enforced complex policies

Sure, but you still had to host their advertisements. I would consider it a platform, but I also wouldn't compare it to facebook.