Ask HN: Has web development become insane or am I stuck in my ways?

I've been working in web development coding mostly in PHP / Laravel since 2008. I enjoyed my time at the beginning when everything was procedural code and things started changing (for the better). At the digital agency I worked at, we moved to frameworks like Laravel and the frontend side of things was pretty static with custom CSS and some custom Javascript. Everything was hosted on a big dedicated server that would eventually become a VPS per client. The web was really simple then but understandly so were users' expectations of what the web could do and so there wasn't this mismatch that I feel I'm finding now. Fast forward to today and I'm doing primarily product development for early stage startups. CSS is a problem that is solved with Tailwind (for me at least anyway, I know it's a contentious topic). Backend is a problem solved with Laravel which truly does provide everything I've ever needed and in cases where it hasn't (for compute h