The idea that the 2014 stack is more complex than the 2010 belies the author's youth and lack of perspective. 2014 is not especially more complex than 2010. I mean granted there is more CSS and web technologies to know, that stuff is certainly moving faster than it did in say 2000-2004, and so there is a higher bar for what is possible. But the biggest difference between 2010 and 2014 is better tools. And to be perfectly clear, by tools I mean very broadly anything developers use to get the job done, languages, frameworks, browsers, services, etc. Developers weren't learning and mastering fewer things ten years, they were just mastering stupider things like IE6 layout bugs.

Assuming the same knowledge of contemporary tech, the 2014 developer can do more with less than the 2010 developer. The stack is only bigger if you have reason to make it bigger, which is far from a foregone conclusion. LAMP is more effective today than it was in 2010 because HTML/CSS/JS/PHP are better (and frankly LAMP was already moving off the bleeding edge a decade ago, not in 2010). Now obviously the development of JS frameworks and nosql databases has progressed significantly, so that potentially adds to the layers you can employee and the things to learn, but none of those things are required to be "full-stack". All that stuff could be done before, you just had to roll your own or use earlier-gen tech that was maybe not as optimal. Certainly heavy javascript was already well-entrenched by 2010.

The crux of the matter is defining "full-stack"? The author talks as if this is about being up to speed with all facets of the latest web tech, but that is a useless definition. There is simply too much tech now for anyone to know it all in any meaningful capacity. Of course I agree with the author that there are a lot of useless blowhards out there talking about being "full-stack" developers. This is because we are well into year 2 or 3 of "full-stack" being a cargo-culted buzzword that is latched onto by posers and wannabes from all walks of tech life.

But like all such overplayed ideas, "full-stack" has a legitimate origin. It comes from the fact that the web was really developed and evolved by two distinct sets of people. You had the programmers who were back-end focused (because javascript was not treated as a serious language for the first 10 years of its existence despite rapid ubiquity), and you had the web designers pushing visual design, first through HTML and then additionally CSS. It took a long time to close the gap between these two groups, and during that time, it was very rare to find anyone with any talent in web design who could program or vice-versa. In the mid-2000s once a few people started to achieve the requisite 10k hours of practice, true full-stack developers started to appear, and since then as the web became something that people had grown up with from early childhood, the number of people who built things end-to-end on the web only increased.

For a short time, "full-stack" was a pretty strong distinction because it meant a passion and focus on the web as a unique platform at a time when most top talent was immigrating from other disciplines. Today, however, everyone attending a bootcamp as a career move is training to be "full-stack" because that's simply what the HR people demand. It's completely orthogonal from whether someone is a good developer, and it's at least partially orthogonal from any list of particular skills—it just means someone can build both the front-end and back-end of a web app in some form; the specifics and expectations of which vary widely from job to job.