It’s funny this came up, because it was kinda similar to the whole “AI frauds” thing these days.
I don’t particularly remember why, but “hand writing” fancy HTML and CSS used to be a flex in some circles in the 90s. A bunch of junk and stuff like fixed positioning in the source was the telltale sign they “cheated” with FrontPage or Dreamweaver lol
My only gripe was that they tended to generate gobs of “unsemantic” HTML. You resized a table and expect it to be based on viewport width? No! It’s hardcoded “width: X px” to whatever your size the viewport was set to.