This seems like a good insight and it feels true to me as well.
My guess is the absolute number of people who treat it like a "craft" is higher than 20 years ago, but as a fraction of all developers it has shrunk dramatically.
That is not remotely the case. All software, not just websites, is a lot worse than it was 10 years ago. Bloated, slow, buggy messes that resulted from the industry hiring a bunch of people who just wanted to do the bare minimum and make fat stacks, rather than hiring people who actually care about good engineering.
Holy shit, no, they are not. What world do you live in?
This is the opposite of my experience. I find websites take much more time to load, are designed to require many more actions and interaction time to navigate, often break and are replaced by a blank page if any error occurs, use huge numbers of ad/tracking requests and JS, and are filled with accessibility-standard-violating unnecessary JS animations.
This one, for instance:
> But exactly which details are deemed “unimportant” is a very consequential and sometimes subjective decision. And eventually, the details always leak through.
Right, so you're saying this new technology will still reward deep technical understanding, because there's no way around it. I agree. Why is the whole tone of this thing "AI is making my craft a cheap commodity?"
Websites are largely better, technically, than they were 10 years ago. They're more full-featured, they're faster, SSL/a11y/responsiveness are stronger defaults. Content mills / SEO / news sites are a separate, terrible failure mode of ads and corporate incentives. That's not React's fault!