At some point in the early-mid-00s we as engineers just "gave up" on the web as it was formulated as a document/resource transfer system with hyperlinking, and turned it into this ungainly mess of DOM manipulation, rampant RPC calling, database abusing, JS bound bloat. Finding the HTML document under the weight of ... stuff... on top has become impossible.

There were precursors to this... GWT was an early example of abuse of the web browser stack to accomplish something very non-webby. But it's really gone full bore now.

Back in the mid-90s when I made web pages for a living when some designer came to us with a photoshop mockup in a PSD and said "make the page look like this" we felt perfectly fine saying "no, the web can't do that. design for the web, not photoshop"; no such luck now. And so here we are...