It does take geniuses to design and operate the incredibly complex cloud-native distributed systems we all insist on doing now.

It’s fair to point out how far you can get just programming one computer using traditional and well understood concepts like sockets and threads. And how weird it is that we live in a world where Kubernetes is mainstream and fun but threads are esoteric.

I'm not a genius. I started programming in BASIC. I haven't had a lot of schooling: I haven't had a computer science class since I was 12, and I didn't finish high school. I just didn't stop learning.

Adding unnecessary complexity doesn't always make things easier to learn.

Very well put. It's also a matter of use cases. These people seemingly implement servers for big companies. I just make shitty websites. We aren't their target audience yet it comes off as 'this is what everyone should be doing'.

I think part of the point of this is that this approach isn't particularly complicated (writing in assembly is unecessary, but everything else described in both the article and the comment above is basically the simplest way to make a webserver).