They were fun with Delphi on Windows 98

this is what counted as fun: https://computerhistory.org/blog/introducing-the-smalltalk-z...

You might be right on the first part, but I'm young and optimistic enough to reject the second part.

Effortless? I am not that optimistic. Don't get me wrong. I love programming but it's not effortless. The best problems are the hard one: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/images/4/40/FunComic.png

I could've been more clear: the "using the computer" part (what you might call incidental/accidental complexity) should be effortless. The problem itself can be as challenging as you'd like to tackle :)

I can totally understand your grievance with all the loops you have to jump through to get JS running. I can get an okayish webapp running with the Django Stack in about two hours; when I use JS it takes me hours just to configure webpack. I just use intercooler or htmx nowadays and ditched React and Vue. The customers don't care if they use a SPA or a traditional one. They just want their logo in the corner. They even don't care about the round trip to the server when doing input validation as long as the input is still there after validating it and a meaningful error message is there. But still - there is a lot of boilerplate for CRUD Apps and views. Maybe RoR does this part better...