The LAMP stack was effectively fucking magic and basically the whole reason many of us are in this field right now. Specifically, PHP/MySQL mostly "just worked"

The LAMP stack was effectively fucking magic and basically the whole reason many of us are in this field right now. Specifically, PHP/MySQL mostly "just worked" and dealt with most of the stupid stuff for you. Yes, the performance was kinda meh sometimes (but back then a normal page load had a dozen assets, not hundreds) and not-strict typing, behind-the-scenes shenanigans, and other magic made for some interesting bugs... but overall, it worked, and it was easy enough for a middle schooler to pick up. I switched tracks from webdev to systems pretty quick but sometimes I look at what's going on in webdev today and frankly it's pretty disturbing. The sheer amount of complexity to render some HTML and JS is mind-boggling. And the worst part is it's not even that much better than it was back in the LAMP days. Pages still take forever to load, browser compat is still crap, and heavy sites are still gross. The only difference is the amount of complexity, gatekeeping, and sheer busywork that these new frameworks/languages/systems bring in. Or maybe I'm just the old man yelling at the clouds.