I have been doing web development for over two decades now, and honestly things were only simpler if your expectations were much, much lower. If you have the sa

I have been doing web development for over two decades now, and honestly things were only simpler if your expectations were much, much lower. If you have the same expectations today, everything is still just as simple. If you see no added benefit to having your page run in the browser, then by all means do things the old way, and you'll find that even doing the things the old way is today much simpler than it used to be. If you do want to create a web application that for a large part runs in the browser, I can only see things getting better every year. The perceived added complexity is simply because we are now doing stuff that's more complex. TL;DR: Building horse carriages was a lot easier than building autonomous cars.