alt Hacker NewsFrontend development in the early days was nightmare. I don't know why people pretend there was some kind of golden age but there really was not.
You could still develop frontend in the old way. Most browsers are very good at supporting old websites. But on one wants that.
Nowadays though, that old way is working very well, because of all the things that were added to HTML and CSS, making things, which used to be annoying or difficult mostly easy.