It's the most upvoted comment for a reason. Back then, people fell in love with GMail and suddenly everyone thought they were building another GMail. This wasn

It's the most upvoted comment for a reason. Back then, people fell in love with GMail and suddenly everyone thought they were building another GMail. This wasn't true. Most people were building an app with a couple of forms, a datagrid and maybe 2 highly interactive pages. PHP, Python & Ruby frameworks gave perfect support for all this >10 years ago. You had jQuery plugins you added to page in 30 minutes and you had validation. In 2 hours you had a datagrid. Autocomplete, datepicker, things like this was no problem. It was a form of egoism all the time. Coding Sign In page was work for less than an hour. Now, in React, it's 2 days. Look at developers now and compare them with senior devs a decade ago. My estimate is that development today is 4 times slower. Given a growth of salary at least 50%, a system back then in MySQL, jQuery, Django or Zend Framework for $40,000 is now $240,000 in React with GraphQL, Mongo, etc.