There’s also change over time to consider: web programming has become immensely more stable and simpler and more mature over time, thereby enabling classes of application and experience that traditionally meant a client application to be built on the web, hence modern web app development becoming a complex and complicated morass.

Facebook and others have delivered a bunch of cross platform shizz that really should be baked into the desktop and mobile OS itself, moving complexity up the stack. Microsoft Office uses React, to highlight the issue. We’ve spent decades chasing the basics of fat client development and doing it in JavaScript.

It's freaking wild that the folks suggesting web development has gotten simpler are also talking about baking React "into the stack" with a straight face.

I don't know what planet y'all are living on, but React is most emblematic of the layers upon layers of BS that people have to deal with today that simply were not an issue 20 years ago.