+1 to this. I seriously believe frontend was more productive in the 2010-2015 era than now, despite the flaws in legacy tech. Projects today have longer timelines, are more complex, slower, harder to deploy, and a maintenance nightmare.
I remember maintaining webpack-based projects, and those were not exactly a model of simplicity. Nor was managing a fleet of pet dev instances with Puppet.
Puppet isn’t a front end problem, but I do agree on Webpack - which is one reason it wasn’t super common. A lot of sites either didn’t try to bundle things or had simple Make-level workflows which were at least very simple, and at the time I noted that these often performed similarly: people did, and still do, want to believe there’s a magic go-faster switch for their front end which obviates the need to reconsider their architectural choices but anyone who actually measured it knew that bundlers just didn’t deliver savings on that scale.
