Nobody is exactly equally adept at two different things, but there are certainly people who can do both frontend jobs and backend jobs at a sufficiently skilled

Nobody is exactly equally adept at two different things, but there are certainly people who can do both frontend jobs and backend jobs at a sufficiently skilled level. Full-stack is a term that exists, so shouldn't it apply to them? The thing is of course that there are many different stacks, and that someone can do both frontend and backend doesn't mean they have a lot of experience in the exact stack a company wants to recruit for. But that can't be helped, you can't really expect a two word label to cover all the complexity involved. It's become popular to combine JS frontend work with JS in the backend, and share code between them. That makes it relatively easy to be full stack. So for some people, it doesn't mean more than that exact stack.