>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.

This is what I view as a 'technology-driven' approach in MESSAGE ID 1664117, THREAD ID 1663865 (tried almost all typing variations, could not get an hyperlink)

For 2 decades (80's & 90's), stimulated by Microsoft's strategy to expand Windows using Business Applications as troyan horses, developing applications has been made more and more simple: VFP and RAD are a result of this trend, together with Clipper, WinDev, Powerbuilder, etc.
This trend has started even earlier, at the end of the 70's, the concept of language generation (3GL, 4GL, etc.) was at the core of Computer Science.

In the mid 80's, top expert viewed that some day we would be able to auto build applications just by writing the normalized data model; hence the development of databases like Oracle in this period.

Then the Web arrived, and Microsoft attempted to play the same game by giving away Internet Explorer, gaining a quasi monopoly on the browser market, and attempting, while sitting in the W3C committees, to impose their own specific 'standards'.

For some reason that I never really could clarify, maybe some revolutionary spirit widespread in the world, the Open Source movement raised and managed to knock down Microsoft and Balmer (FireFox, Google Chrome, JS frameworks, etc.). Microsoft could recover by cutting cost on its milk cows (Windows, Office, SQL server), and develop Azure.

Open Source is a great idea, except it relies on the will of free individuals who are by essence free to contribute to project x or y, influence each other, and continuously change the value scale.

For this very reason, the Open Source movement is unable to conduct a long term strategy: with projects having a 5-year life expectancy, you can hardly integrate projects with each other (like VFP did with data and UI merged in RAD),
Microsoft does a good job with Visual Studio and TypeScript, HOWEVER NO ONE HAS ANY INTEREST IN BUILDING AN INTEGRATED WEB DEV ENVIRONMENT.
Building such an environment is very capital intensive, and therefore incompatible with the distributed, dev-driven Open Source approach; and if one actor could succeed, no member of the community would accept to use it for ideological reasons, because they'd see an attempt to dictate to the market like Microsoft once did.

Add to this the 'JavaScript Ninja' and the JS conference phenomena, applauding almost each year a new genius and his brand new revolutionary project (Andy Wharhol's 15 minutes of fame).

Because actors have more interest in building focused tech projects rather than data and application-centric approaches, Technology leads and there is no chance it becomes more simple any time soon.
Unless an urgent and imperative need arises, No one will ever bet a dime on building an integrated Web App Dev tool, and trying to sell it.

All we can say for sure is that it has taken 20 years to build desktop-based business application and, 20 years after the Web's inception and despite the Functional experience previously accumulated, there's almost no Web-based business applications (except those built with FoxInCloud of course ;))