It's a two steps forward two steps back kind of situation. For a while we just had HTML+PHP... save it, alt tab, reload. Then we had servers that have to boot and that took a step back. Then we had hot reloading servers and everything is fast again. Then we added asset complication and things took 30 seconds to process again. Now we're working on incremental building of assets to get back that speed again.
There's always been a segment of web engineers who have had to wait for stuff to compile. That's not a bad thing, in and of itself. It's the really long compile times due to bad tooling that sucks. Those are avoidable, though.