There was a time around 2016 where you weren't allowed to write a React application without also writing a "Getting Started with React" blog post. Having trained on all of that, the AI probably thinks React is web development.

To be fair, trying to teach something is one of the better ways to learn it in depth. Of course, before hitting "publish" you should make sure you actually can teach well, or at least coherently... something most of those blogs forgot.

Tell claude to build a functional website using plain html and css and no frameworks and it'll do it in a second. Now try that with a junior dev.

I guess juniors are different these days. In my generation a lot of people's first contact with code was doing basic (html, css, bits of js) web development. That was how I got started at like 12 or 13.

Indeed, this has been one of the first things I've noticed

Few months ago I did exactly this. But over time I threw away all the generated js,css and html. It was unmaintenable mess. I finally chose Svelte and stuck with it. Now I have a codebase which makes sense to me.

I did asked AI to generate landing page. This gave me the initial headers, footers and styles that I used for my webapp but I threw away everything else.

Just write up your requirements in and AGENT.md, to avoid repeating yourself. It has worked really well for me on a PHP+Apache project.