[troupo]

What you wrote at the beginning is: "It is almost as if people have no idea how difficult automatic page layout and formatting is."

However, the rest of your text is: "look how difficult it is on the web, and look at all these amazing things people do despite this being so difficult on the web".

All the complexity on the web is 100% self-inflicted. It started as a simple system to display a couple of paragraphs of text accompanied by a couple of images in one rendering pass. That's it. And then it grew haphazardly, with no roadmap or plan, through a series of hacks bolted on top to give it more capabilities.

We could do the "near-impossible PhD-level stuff" in 1970s [1]. The Mother of All Demos from 1968 arguably had more capabilities than the web even today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

For some reason you took "it's difficult to do on the web" as an inviolable axiom of "it's difficult to do, period". The entirety of "impossible layout on the web" is about as complex as what WordStar could handle in mid-1990s

[1] This screenshot is from 1981: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taouu/html/graphics/starsc... (from http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taouu/html/ch02s05.html)