[BoxFour]

> Previously an individual new to web development might have genuinely needed to develop an understanding of web protocols, HTML, and other stuff in that domain

That hasn't really been my experience, at least not for a long time (decades+). At least since jQuery's been around. There's always been a large group of people whose approach to software development was basically "run these commands, don't worry about why they work".

The tendency to treat tools as black boxes over time isn't new, I don't think.

A silver lining here is that in my experience the non-curious tended to stagnate over time and the curious tended to succeed, but obviously there's more to it than just that.