This factoid about web dev misses the fact that the JS developers today are often the same people who were writing CGI, Perl and PHP, some of us also ASP and later ASP.NET, or some Java. We always knew there are good parts about the old ways and merging the two was always the goal - it just takes some time to get the client side right and then to get the merging right.

This especially applies to React core devs. Remember XHP?