[mrthrowaway999]

Similar experience.

Started with html 3.2/xhtml and css as a kid. Some years later got a job and did Django + jQuery, but found myself drawn into infra. A year ago I worked alongside a web dev team and decided to peek into their work--nothing made sense anymore. The amount of complexity was staggering. It seemed like they spent most of their time managing that complexity, eg. reducing build times, solving dependency problems, solving weird TS issues, handling errors in different components, etc.

In the Django+jQuery days, the emphasis was still always on what user got to see and use.