That's what I meant by not having as many site-facing features. But, as someone who has written and used quite a few very usable sites when HTML4 and CSS2 was the norm, maybe it's not really a problem; and writing simple code and not trying to trendchase is good for both accessibility and browser diversity:
Hey, I was around in times of not even having inline-blocks at our disposal too. It was horrible and I don't want to go back to it. I mean I don't even disagree with you entirely, but I don't really think flexbox or grid (which I know ie supports if you're willing to do the whole thing twice in two different syntaxes, which I'm not) is just a cherry on top, if anything they should have existed years before they did. Especially these days with responsive layouts being a thing, and if you don't want to just cheat and use javascript/browser detection to do it, they are pretty important to support different devices. That's where IE support can really step on your toe
by the way, I read that article at the time and opened my site in safari 6 on an old second generation ipod, and it worked hilariously well. Believe me, I'm not part of the problem, but I still can't wait for ie11 to fucking die so I can just write my layouts without having to worry about it's various idiosyncrasies, and finally use grid without impunity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25915313
It's not about the tool but how you use it...