>>on my side I've very often seen facts very different, and very often contrary to opinions and 'gut feelings'.

Certainly I'd agree that web development is the worst sort of Rube Goldbergism, mostly of interest to Autistics who delight in the byzantine complexities. This is opposite the usual technical trend that celebrates black-boxing/encapsulation and hugely decreased maintenance.

Part of it results from vendors refusing to leave things alone: the idea that an app written in the 1990s might still work today, is treated as laughable by many. No, it needs to be re-written in Heath-Robinson-du-Jour with 4 domain experts who specialize in their part of the contraption.

The other issue is that many domains have standards bodies overseeing quality or accreditation of new ways including peer-reviewed studies of efficacy, but development tool vendors simply announce that the new Visual Stardust is better than sliced bread and fixes all the problems we denied in Visual Unicorn that we will now deprecate, with accreditation only for those who must endure/enjoy the latest exciting developments until we do it all again in 18 months.

On the issue we have disagreed about: we are experiencing issues with browser techniques we first wrote over a decade ago that now are being closed because hackers might use them. Yesterday we resuscitated a swag of management routines written in the 1990s before being moved to the web in the early 2000s. A few slight changes to use current SQL Server tables rather than dbfs and the scx/vcxes simply work. Which is where Fox in Cloud comes in, since if need be we can almost certainly put it back on the web using your clever stuff. In contrast, I can only imagine trying to modernize NET or web apps written in the 1990s/early 2000s... almost certainly easier to start over.