This is my experience as well and I agree with your point. 25 years ago, I had to know which parts of HTML, JavaScript, or CSS did or didn't work properly in d

This is my experience as well and I agree with your point. 25 years ago, I had to know which parts of HTML, JavaScript, or CSS did or didn't work properly in different versions of Netscape, Internet Explorer, and a few other browsers. This also varied by platform. Internet Explorer 4.x varied significantly between the 16-bit version on Windows 3.11, the 32-bit version on Windows 95/98, and the surprisingly decent version they released for the Mac. "Graceful degradation" was the goal on my team, so it wasn't so much about building functionality with JavaScript as it was about using it to make things more convenient when possible, without breaking things otherwise. For example, we would use client-side validation to save a round-trip to the server, but server-side validation would ultimately catch the problems if a client had JavaScript disabled. Keeping those validation rules in sync was a pain, because the server-side code was written in a different language from the client-side code. I do think that frontend development is more complicated than it needs to be these days, but understanding the evolution, I can certainly see why it reached this point.