I started in the 90s and have dipped in and out of web dev ever since, but my impression is that a lot of the complexity stems from organizations and teams gett

I started in the 90s and have dipped in and out of web dev ever since, but my impression is that a lot of the complexity stems from organizations and teams getting bigger and needing to work with one another. Frameworks and tools proliferate in order to make it easier to spread the work out across devs, communicate with one another, deal with version control, etc. The other main reason is to deal with the fact that a lot of web 'pages' are actually apps now and have to talk to the server/there's a bunch of backend stuff going on, so there has to be reconciliation between front-end and back-end. If you're working on your own and don't need a back-end, there are options for putting up a personal site. Webflow[0] and Squarespace[1] come to mind. They'd be taken seriously semi-professionally in non-tech spaces. Can't speak to tech ones. [0]: https://webflow.com/?r=0 https://webflow.com/?r=0 [1]: https://www.squarespace.com/ https://www.squarespace.com/