> Or we are talking about different eras. I'm on about early 90s.

I think you're misremembering then. There _was_ no web development to speak of in the early 90s. The web was largely a niche technology until the mid-90s. Mosaic released in January '93, Netscape in October '94, and IE in August '95. By the end of '93, there were a total of 130 websites[1], most of them from universities and research centers. By the end of '94, a whopping 2,278 websites. JavaScript first appeared in September '95 (Netscape), and CSS in August '96 (IE).

> You didn't need Javascript most of the time and CSS incompatibilities were easy to remember (I'm talking about cognitive overhead here)

Depending on what you're building, you still don't need JS most of the time today. The difference is that today all browser implementations are ECMAScript compliant, and the core functionality is much more capable than in the 90s, so you can get by with just sprinkling JS where and when you need it, without resorting to frameworks, build tools, libraries, and any of the complexities commonly associated with modern frontend web development. This is without a doubt, an objectively better state than what we had in the 90s.

Of course, actually relying on external dependencies would make your life easier, so the difficult task is picking the right technology to use from a sea of poorly built and maintained software. This is the drawback of a platform exploding in popularity, but it doesn't say anything about the web itself.

As for CSS, how can you honestly say incompatibilities were easy to remember? Netscape was initially pushing for its own competing styling format, JSSS[2], and it didn't officially support CSS until version 4.0 (June '97). Even then, not all CSS properties were supported[3]. So it wasn't even a matter of remembering incompatibilities; developers literally had to target specific browsers, and even specific versions of browsers. Vendor prefixes were required for pretty much everything, and are still used today, though thankfully, core CSS features are widely supported, and they're only needed for advanced features. There's no way that all of these incompatibilities were easier to deal with in the 90s.

> That's in the region of 10 years after when I'm talking about. A completely different era. By that point the web had already turned into the shitshow it is now.

jQuery appeared precisely as a response to the lackluster state of JS in browsers, and to make development easier by not worrying about browser incompatibilities. My point is that up until then, web development _was_ a shitshow.

> Its not a sentiment. It's a fact

Funny how I can disagree with a "fact" then...

> The hard part is finding something that will still be around in 5 years time.

It's really not, unless you're chasing the latest hype train. jQuery is 17, React is 10, Vue is 9, etc. And like I said, you don't strictly need any of it. If you write standards-compliant HTML/CSS/JS, it will serve you for decades to come with minimum maintenance. You've been able to do the same since arguably the late 2000s.

> Who writes plain HTML and JS?

Many people do.

> There's so much bloat required to get anything to look modern that nobody writes plain web sites any longer

That is factually not true.

> That's literally how sites were originally written. It's not a new invention

I'm not saying it is. My point is that you can still do that today.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Style_Sheets

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS#Difficulty_with_adoption