> web dev today is still just as hard, but for different reasons

As someone who did webdev back in the 2000s and still does it now, I do not agree with this at all. Webdev is easy now. Especially with the development of simpler build systems (esbuild, vite, etc) in the couple of years.

Or maybe you have just gotten better after doing it for 20+ years? I can't imagine anything being easier than plain HTML and CSS

> I can't imagine anything being easier than plain HTML and CSS

Well you can still make websites with plain HTML and CSS today, and the layout modes (and other niceties like border-radius) that are available today so are much nicer than the ones that were available 20 years AND they work the same in every browser!

20 years ago you were cobbling together layout with tables and floats (you didn't even have `display: inline-block`). And people still wanted vaguely responsive layouts even though there weren't any media queries yet. Plus there were 3-4 major browser engines that you needed to test with, and there were often major differences in both feature support, bugs and layout between them. For example you had to deal with the fact that IE used what is now known as `box-sizing: border-box` while other browsers used `box-sizing: content-box`, and the fact that browsers didn't even parse HTML consistently you could easily end up with different node tree in different browsers.

>they work the same in every browser!

That's because there's only one (alright, two) browsers.

There are 3. Safari is distinct from Chrome these days (even though they are derived from a common base). The fact that you consider them the same is evidence of what I'm saying: that differences in rendering between browsers tend to be minimal these days :)

Plain HTML and CSS are tedious.

Combine that with the fact that loops and objects don’t have fantastic support, if any, and it’s no wonder everyone and their mother has tried their hand at a templating framework. (WebComponents exist, but fall into a lot of the same traps; I didn’t like what I saw in the MDN tutorial.)

If you're using a JS build system then your webdev sucks already

I'll take anything over the days of float: left;

float: left is still useful, of course, just for what it was intended rather than what it was abused for.

float: left taught me to never skimp on understanding the things you're using to try do the things your doing!

Web dev has gotten more complex with more complex requirements, but not linearly - its easier to build more complicated products on the web, and as this article shows the primitives we have are much more powerful.

If you want to build something you build back in the 2000s, its so much easier than it was back then.

That reminds me one of the rules of cycling: "it never gets easier, you just go faster"

Web dev is way easier now, if all you're trying to do is the same stuff we tried to do in the early 2000s. All the stuff that makes it harder is because we can do some much more now.