And if a person with 5 years of experience sais he is an expert in a,b,c,d,e you don't need an interview do understand that this person doesn't even know what it takes to be an expert in one of these, because he obviously can't evaluate his skillset properly.
Nowadays you need very little to qualify to be "expert" or "senior".Sure there are exceptions, but in most cases, all you need is be able to use the technology. In most cases, people don't even understand how it works under the hood.
Just like with full-stack developers. Most of those whom I have seen know some front-end, some back end, and very basic database knowledge. And considering that in these cases both front-end and back-end are written in js mostly, "full-stack" here is a huge overstretch.
You can still make something that works on your own, but not using all the new tech. You have to compromise somewhere. The notion of "full stack" devs is long gone. Making modern web apps is a team sport. You literally can't be an expert in everything you need to build a robust, scalable, fast, accessible web app anymore.
They read lot of 'buzzword' on the internet or heard them from their tech friend and ask for everything i.e. Microservice Architecture and cloud and all and etc. since beginning. Resulting in unnecessary huge team and tech complexity. An idea or poc which could had been easily done and tested in market with small techstack/small team. No wonder lot of these products fail.
Anecdotally, in my 20+ years of working for website and web app companies, I have never had a client who has even suggested a specific way of implementing an app. The closest has been when a client has asked for a tech proposal and had it sanity checked by a third party. These days I mostly work on "rescuing" apps that a client has had built by one company, found it hasn't gone well, and has come to the company I work for to make it work properly. All of the crazy tech stack implementations I've seen have come from developers who think they're clever, and never the client demanding something trendy.
Wasn’t any Ansible then, either, you had to write your own damn scripts.
In contrast, competing technologies started out with, "OK, learn computer science. Now learn how HTTP works. And then learn CGI. And some Unix. And then you can do 'Hello, World.'"
The funny part for me is that a lot of us in the latter camp didn't learn computers that way at all. We started out with BASIC:
10 PRINT "Onion2K is cool!"
20 GOTO 10
How many people had rented servers for games? A lot. Now video game companies have turned game servers into a SaaS, whereas then they just released Linux server binaries. In the early 2000s there was a bare metal server rental company on every other street corner.
How many people had Linux/BSD network appliances? Also a lot. There was such a time when all you got from the cable or telco for your broadband service was a modem, and you had to roll your own router/switch. There were a multitude of run-from-a-floppy (or USB stick) BSD and Linux router distros back then.
Also, you're not correct on PHP. The entire reason PHP grew so wildly was because it was server side rendered, and both AOL and Microsoft intentionally hindered their browsers' javascript capabilities in lame attempts to monopolize the internet.
If you want to be effective as a small team, choose tools built for small teams. Rails is a great example.
It is time consuming process to become expert of one thing, requires couple of years of continuous focus.
I don't know How many people are actually expert of all these and how they are going to perform when some issue pop up in production. Try that judging it 30-to-60 minutes of interview.