Often when people perceive signalling it is a confirmation bias -- they feel something and think it exists in the behaviors of others. e.g. I'm doing something

Often when people perceive signalling it is a confirmation bias -- they feel something and think it exists in the behaviors of others. e.g. I'm doing something I think is cool, therefore positive interactions are because of it. I'm insecure therefore everyone is dismissive of me. Having said that, I don't know what timeframe this person is referring to but web development went from extraordinarily hackish and ill considered (the WebForm/php/intermixed render blocks era) to being a quite disciplined portion of the industry. I remember when the overwhelming bulk of web developers wouldn't grok that JavaScript had closures, and they didn't have to use globals to store state during an event handler.