[TeMPOraL]

Nah, what drove web development was the business interest: the core code stays on your servers and is never shipped to users, making piracy impossible and allowing to make users pay you in perpetuity for what otherwise would be a one-time-paid product. Previous attempts at forcing this business model on users involved "licensing servers", but those still left the software vulnerable to cracking.

The whole "we can fix a bug and deploy new version to everyone while still on the phone with the customer who reported the problem" thing was just a bait.

[toyg]

That's still an element of deployment, and I'd argue not even the most relevant. Web dev was picked up also by tons of "hobbyists" who had no interest in any of that. For a long while there were quite a few companies selling web products to install on customers' servers (and there are still so many). In the '90s we built loads of intranet apps who did not care about licensing requirements, but cared deeply about ease of deployment towards employees. The SaaS explosion came much later.

There is no need to be always cynically focused on "evil money", often it's just pragmatism.