[smadge]

That's not an accurate representation of the article at all. I don't think the author is suggesting that web development was nice overall in the past, but that it was nice in the sense that you didn't have to download >100mb of tooling, learn each of those tools and their various plugins, configure said tooling because out of the box they are useless, and endure 10+ second initial compile times, learn dozen of different libraries and frameworks, just to get a simple webapp working, where, 90% of the time, static, or server generated content would have sufficed.