I might be wrong of course, but I understand what bfgoodrich is saying as follows:

Back in the day, before we had all the build pipeline, npm, utility-first, etc css people were already building websites and those also worked just fine.

I sort of agree. There was very little you couldn't do that was a result of the tools to build the sites. The only real constraints were imposed by what technologies were in the standards and which were implemented by browsers.

If you want to build a website today with what is 'normal' tech, you have to learn a whole lot more and people spend tremendous amounts of time in bootstrapping code in order to produce some JavaScript and CSS that in the end provides hardly any added value compared to server-side rendered views with sprinkles of JavaScript.

Apps like Slack are probably an exception to the server-side rendered argument, but I think you'd be better off building those in non-web technology to begin with.

Either way, if you want to spend your days building layers upon layers of abstractions in order to prevent having to fetch some HTML from the server, be my guest.

"Complexities of the web" are all self-inflicted. First, by thinking that everything on the web should be an app. Second, 99% of the complexities is tooling. Downloading two megabytes of crap just to show half a kilobyte of texts is pure madness, yet somehow acceptable, because "complexities".

There is enormous complexity in the field. But, and this is a big but, 99% of the advocacy and "innovation" is in the easiest, most trivial 5% (rough numbers). That I'm pointing out how absurdly circular this is in no universe denigrates the entire realm. But of course it makes criticism easier to pretend it is.

I had no idea my comment would make so many so insecure.

No need for insults or calling people insecure when all I asked for is examples/substance to back your claims. Let's see some screenshots of these cutting edge applications developed 15 years ago. I'd love to see how you made them rich, interactive, and work across a wide variety of devices (mobile, tablets, workstations) with varying screen densities. I'd also be curious how performant these applications were, how much data was being conveyed on screen, etc... Maybe a blog post detailing the architecture and how you achieve all of the concerns of the modern web using bare JS from 15 years ago.

You sound like someone who is at the beginning of the learning curve. Nothing wrong with that but don't be so hostile.

People used tables for positioning and as containers. More data was present compared to whitespace and mobile reduced sites.

People had different screensizes back than. How do you deal with that? You take a 3x3 cell. You cut a picture into 9 slices. You take the top, left, right and bottom images and make them a background at 100% width (top/bottom) or height.

That is the basics of a simple flexibile container.