I'm old school like you are, and morally agree with you. Yet I did change my mind over time regarding this issue. for the sake of argument, assume we do use we

I'm old school like you are, and morally agree with you. Yet I did change my mind over time regarding this issue. for the sake of argument, assume we do use web standards. It makes absolutely no sense for when using such standards, that results differ per browser. In our time, resolving all those differences cost a huge amount of time. Now browsers behave better, but there still may be issues. We've long seen this as some diversity feature of the web, but it's a bug instead. It means millions of developers are spending time on the same non-value added activity every single time. It's a massive and ongoing waste of resources for everybody. (browser makers agree with the above, they all have a compatibility program addressing this) Second, "progressive enhancement" too has been embraced by the careful web developer as the right thing to do. It is. Yet it effectively means building the same thing twice. We've normalized doing that, but it's quite an unnatural approach not seen in any other tech platform I know of. (the above can be solved by browsers coordinating important standards in time, but generally they won't...often) Both issues above are time wasters and technical shortcomings. They still are the right thing to do, but an unwanted thing to do when adding pressure. And pressure we have. We're no longer in the cute web, this is the business web. Developers are very expensive and need to deliver more than ever. Time to market is shorter than ever. Any activity not directly contributing to time to market, is under severe pressure. Note that I still agree with your point about some/many engineers being lazy, indifferent. But I hope you appreciate this view still.