I interviewed someone once for a fullstack role, gave him a mockup of a screen we had to build and asked how he would do it, in short some things on top of other things. The only thing he managed to say was how he would divide everything into components. I thought man, so many devs don't even know how to use html/css anymore, but who's laughing now, you just need to prompt a coding agent.

In the 2000s wasn't everything just misused/abused table layouts? Maybe we frequented different places, but that's how I remember it.

The cause is businesses are putting emphasis on showing their brand on the site. Every dropdown has to look and feel like their product.

In short almost everyone wants their website to be a video game.

I too want to go back to that, but I fear most consumers/potential visitors to your website have been conditioned to expect flashy web by this point and so it's a self reinforcing paradigm.

> A simple dropdown with a finite list? Has its own loader and makes 10 fetch requests for no reason. Not even exaggerating - look at Instagram and Facebook on web.

I’ve seen an address form with search dropdowns that were absolutely bonkers. First it loads the list of countries. You start typing and the list disappears – it sends the text to backend, which returns... exactly the same list. The filtering is then done on the frontend. (After you select the country, you can select the region and then the city, which, of course, work exactly the same.)

IE6 was early 2000s, I remember it not being so great. CSS was starting to be supported but it was a minefield of un-supported features.

It was bad enough I swore off front end work and made a pact with myself to focus only on backend or embedded, for my own mental health :-)

I feel like this comment is channeling https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/