[davnicwil]

> it's kind of a funny return to where I started ~20 years or so ago with web development

It's a journey I've been going on too.

All the new platforms and paradigms that have emerged have had an initial shallow aura of helpfulness that has drawn me in, but almost exclusively when digging in I've realised that they create more issues than they solve, and/or introduce limitations that aren't worth it and force me to write janky, overly complicated code to work around that isn't comprehensible even a few weeks hence.

Maybe the most notable exception to this is containers. But in a sense they're an abstraction over the very same VPS paradigm. So that makes sense. It's not something new or different, just the same thing but with some advantages (and disadvantages too, obviously).