I've been doing web development since the late 1990s. I don't know every fiddly detail of every current web technology, but I can pretty much pick up any of the

I've been doing web development since the late 1990s. I don't know every fiddly detail of every current web technology, but I can pretty much pick up any of them, read the docs for an hour, and have them going in just a bit more time, because I've got a solid foundation from working on things back when even XMLHTTPRequest was but a fever dream. I was recently speaking online to someone trying to get into it from a fresh start, and they lent me their perspective (kinda like a rubber duck debugging session), and I was a bit appalled at how hard it is to get into web development at this level now. I ended up recommending an approach in which one recapitulates the browser's development cycle if you want to really understand what's going on out there... it isn't the best choice technically in the short term because it's a long path to tread just to do "this one thing", but if you want to be similarly flexible and know how to work with the mess of technologies out there, for path-dependent and historically-contingent reasons (that is, opposed to any other good reasons), I think it may still be the best way to go. And to be honest, there's still a lot you can do with server-side generated HTML, the tags in modern HTML, and a bit of pure Javascript. There are good reasons to move beyond that; I don't mean that in a "back in my day" sort of way. But if you do start there, the rest of the stack makes a lot more sense than trying to start directly with React as your first intro to the web, as fine as React may be.