alt Hacker News> On the frontend, you have build pipelines, bundlers, CSS frameworks with their own toolchains, progressive web apps, Core Web Vitals, SEO, layout shifts, srcset/responsive images… I remember when the biggest challenge was IE6 compatibility.
You only have those things if you choose to use them.
I've been building websites for 25 years. I use the same core technologies today that I did when I started. Sure, I make use of modern improvements to the languages themselves, but I have never permanently adopted any of the "hot new trends" and feel I am better - or at least saner - for it.
No, your marketing or e-commerce website almost certainly doesn't need a JS bundling toolchain. It almost certainly doesn't need a CSS preprocessor or even a CSS boilerplate/framework. It almost certainly doesn't need an enterprise-class PHP framework; or a dependency manager; or a CI/CD pipeline.
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What are you using? If you don't mind me asking.
It's so weird to see this take repeated over and over. I have to assume you have never written a large scale project for the web? The only part where I agree is that you don't need PHP or server-side rendering in general.
Those technologies don't just solve tech issues, they solve organizational issues. If one or two people manage a website, going without fancy tooling is completely fine. When 1000 people are managing a product with complex business logic across multiple platforms, you need fancy tooling to ensure everyone can work at a reasonable level of productivity.