> We used to be able to just make a solid web site with simple HTML and a text editor. I shouldn't need to be an extremely hardcore JS programmer or use a crazy

> We used to be able to just make a solid web site with simple HTML and a text editor. I shouldn't need to be an extremely hardcore JS programmer or use a crazy static site generator or overengineered LAMP backend to do basic things like reusing HTML and other things that could be largely accomplished with just HTML itself. None of that functionality has gone away, has it? A lot of what a static site generator is doing is saving you copy-pasting a bunch of HTML across files, by giving you templates for common functionality. But you still end up with plain HTML files, and you can certainly get there by editing them all by hand in a text editor.