You could learn enough HyperTalk to do useful things inside a day - I know; I did exactly that, when I was 11 or 12 and had a chance to find out on a Mac at the museum where an uncle of mine then worked. Granted I already had experience with Apple BASIC, so wasn't a complete programming novice, but I'd never worked in a graphical environment before, and yet still managed to turn out a fairly presentable, if short, "choose your own adventure" style game with some complex world state in just a few hours.
It would be utterly risible to suggest that a child of similar age and prior experience could do the same today, starting from scratch with web technologies. Yes, you can do more with the modern web. But the initial complexity barrier is very much higher.
Not that risable: my 11 year old has gone through the Python Crash Course book and built a basic Django pizza ordering website with a database in a day.
That’s after work his way through much of the book, of course, but... as with any complex domain, the right teacher can make a big difference.
I think that goes to both your point and mine; sure, the website does a little more in that it can be accessed from computers other than the one where it's running, but he also needed a whole book to do not much more than scratch the surface of what we call "web programming".
That's not to say it isn't a significant accomplishment, and he should be proud of it!
I don’t know that it is only scratching the surface - the book gets you into an interactive site that is styled with Bootstrap, uses a database, uses web APIs, pushes to Heroku so it’s HA and scalable, etc.
It’s pretty much all the major elements of web programming but using the more elegant ways of simplifying the experience.
I’m not denying the complexity just saying that there are still many (particularly in Python or in cloud PaaSes) who value streamlining the experience.
I'd still call it scratching the surface in that I doubt it goes into details on how any of those things actually work, and that's an important consideration because it's the basis for knowing how to deal with any of them going wrong. No doubt you'd have been able to provide support in that case, but it still goes to the point of there being a much larger potential depth of complexity here.
I get the sense the book tries to surf the reader over the top of most of that ocean, and that's reasonable enough, but the ocean is still there. I wouldn't consider it all that comparable to Hypercard, which in this metaphor I guess is more like the town pool back when those still existed? People who are ready for the deep end can dive into it, and people who feel like paddling around in the shallow end is more their speed can safely do that too.
I mean, I can, if you spot me Node/Express or even TS/React as the stack to use. Those are at the core of my professional discipline, and I know what's going on well enough with them that standing up a new project, complete with compilers, linters, style formatters, style linters, and so on, doesn't take me much.
But that's building on close to twenty years of working in the field, and a bit over three decades since I first put my hands on an Apple IIe's keyboard and wrote
10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10
Which is the key part, really - I wasn't far past 10 PRINT "HELLO" when I happened upon Hypercard, and I was still able to use it effectively with no more background than that. I don't know that there's anything comparable today.
Yes, todays web is far more complex. But the early web from the time when HyperCard failed was totally different. At that age I absolutely learned enough to make my own home page. For many years that's simply all the web was: home pages, webrings, etc.
Hypercard scripting was intended for non-programmers. Normal people can do wonders with simple tools after little learning. Just like people using spreadsheets. Hypercard made programming available for non-programmers.
It would be utterly risible to suggest that a child of similar age and prior experience could do the same today, starting from scratch with web technologies. Yes, you can do more with the modern web. But the initial complexity barrier is very much higher.