[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.