The premise isn't that what I'm using will make it easy for somebody with zero knowledge to become good at web development in 24 hours or a week or a month, or any such pitch. It's certainly relative.

The relative simplicity is in that the stack is quite set and restricted, with no unnecessary pieces. I don't add to it just because the industry finds a new flavor of the week or something loses/gains popularity. Each part of the stack has a job to do and I don't add to it constantly or constantly turn over what's in it. That stack could remain entirely unchanged for five or more years easily. Where it can be avoided I don't use unnecessary incrementals that add dependencies or complexity (which will often resurface in the loss of reliability/predictability). I often don't use the latest versions of anything unless there's a very good reason to switch sooner than later. I might stick with Ubuntu 16.04 or 18.04 for the next decade if it were a safe thing to do from a security perspective. In that approach, I can place as much of my energy and focus on what I'm building as possible (since everything I build is mine, that's where my priority and interest is).

Web development was always a means to an end for me. It enables me to build things that I want to see exist. I don't love web development unto itself (I'm rather neutral on it), I love what it enables me to do. I grew up in the middle of nowhere Appalachia. An atheist, social liberal in a typical conservative region that was intellectually unfulfilling, uninspiring, non-ambitious, slow (it was also peaceful, green, and with very little crime). The Internet (and Web) showed up there around 1993-1994 and it was like something from another planet, my teenaged brain could see immediately what could be done with the open canvas and from then forward all I wanted to do was build on it. You're telling me there's this always expanding virtual space, seemingly infinite, and I can just build, and build, and build anything that I can think of? And it connects me up to millions (later billions) of other people? And it's not even very expensive to mess with? Holy shit, let's go.

So what I primarily care about is the thing being constructed, and I want my stack to be very reliable, fast and without many frills or unnecessary complexities. I don't want it to get in the way. I don't want to have to fight with it every time I begin a new project, I want to immediately get to building, with the stack being the 'ol reliable companion that just does its job.

If there's something far better nearby (that is reliable + low on complexity) with minimal learning curve, I'll consider it; I switched to PHP 7 very rapidly for example because the speed increase was such a considerable gain and it required very little time/effort to switch. I started utilizing Go because it was easy to learn, simple and fast (I worked with Java in the 1990s, and never wanted to go through that again); Redis is much the same story, I use it for all sorts of things (from caching to various throttling tasks) and it was pretty ridiculously easy to start using vs the enormous value I derive from it. I'd be happy to keep using my current version of Redis for the rest of this decade. I've been using Photoshop 7 since 2002 because it just works and handles ~95% of everything I need in that space (and they can't do anything to force me to upgrade).

It's also worth noting that I handle every aspect of building and operating a service in the beginning. So this adds emphasis on not shaking the stack unnecessarily, the time costs can become large fast.