I am a systems programmer with very little experience writing html, but I have written some very basic frontends for a blog and a startup website. What real web developers can do with the tooling they have is amazing. There is a gigantic mountain of abstractions here, and they almost feel arbitrary, but when you read about them, you learn that each absurdly general tool was put into a standard or a framework to do a specific thing.

To me, web development feels about the same as the time I made a processor in minecraft: you have so many weird and arbitrary constraints placed on you by the framework of HTML + CSS (let alone adding a JS framework), and then on top of that you have n + 1 different tools and methodologies to do the same thing, each of which has subtle tradeoffs. It amazes me that anyone can actually develop code in that environment!