I strongly suspect getting started with front-end development is much harder than in 2000-2005. The tools and resources (codepen, stackoverflow, youtube, etc)

I strongly suspect getting started with front-end development is much harder than in 2000-2005. The tools and resources (codepen, stackoverflow, youtube, etc) are 100x better and more numerous, but many of those tools also make for much longer toolchains, which add complexity, as do all modern frameworks, on top of expectations of what a website is, so the learning curve and total cruft to get started is significantly higher. The sheer number of terms you will be introduced to is much higher. Imagine a brand new person who wants to learn JS and all the terms they will encounter in the first month of searching around: React, Vue, GraphQL, MongoDB, Node, npm, Apollo, Typescript, Babel, Eslint, Grunt, Gulp, git, SCSS, Sass, tailwind, etc. How many of these do they really need to know? What decisions do they need to make about them, if any? (eg react or svelte). Not only are there are lot of terms, but its not obvious to a total newcomer which of them are actually relevant to front-end development and which are not. It's obvious to us, but only because we are steeped in it already. So a mentor seems more essential than ever before. By comparison, in the Geocities era, getting introduced to things and feeling your way around making changes to a site felt much less complicated. And for frameworks/tools they would learn about jQuery, and maybe Wordpress, and that's pretty much the only such terms they'd come across. So it at least looks a lot more daunting than 2005. I think this is somewhat unfortunate, and we might be scaring away good would-be programmers.