Web Development

More specifically, he argued (and the recent and upcoming releases of most major frameworks agree) that rendering most content on the server with islands of client-side interactivity is the future.

That’s not necessarily a huge revelation, but the big difference from what people have been doing with PHP for decades is the level of integration and simplicity in mixing server-side and client-side code seamlessly so that a dev can choose the appropriate thing in each context and not have to go through a lot of effort when requirements change or scaling becomes an issue. I would say that this represents a new level of maturity in the “modern” web frameworks where devs can choose the right technology for every problem to serve their users best.

I think you would be pleasantly surprised by the direction web dev is moving if you gave it a chance.

For example, I suspect that you think one of the ways the web has gotten shittier is because sites are too bloated and JavaScript frameworks are too heavy and slow.

One of the key takeaways is that, across almost all frameworks and stacks, web dev is moving back to doing as much work on the server-side as possible, while retaining the minimum necessary interactivity via Islands of Interactivity with much lighter JavaScript than what was pushed for the last decade.