definitely wasn't roses. having to deal with a bunch of transparent gifs to for rounded buttons during the web 2.0 craze was a headache...but at least it was immediate, i was working directly in html and css
and yes you're right the overall scene now is 100x better in terms of the open source community. many problems have been sold. it's more the tooling and layering of everything that is exhausting, and the ever expanding list of nuances and edge cases...
Anyway yeah the new NPM world causes a lot of pain. Module problems throw me as a sort of occasional enough to to deep dive into the topic but often enough to be a PITA. Usually things work with 3 techs but the 4th one buckled it. Eg React? Cool! Typescript? Cool! NextJS Cool! StoryBook … oh shit this ain’t gonna work.
In a silo like .NET and especially in the 2008 heydey stuff just worked with other stuff. Even on .NET now it is complex as every old initiative still exists and you might have to use it hut there is a lot of new stuff. There are at least 3 versions of web programming paradigm.
I just think we need fewer tech choices but that probably wont happen. The incentives are aligned to have a soup of competing options.
It is great and bad at the same time.
We are getting more done now. People are making SaaS in their spare time. That is amazing! Tell someone in 2010 that it is not only possible but cheap and commonplace to do so!