I agree with the article; web programming is an absolute disaster of snowballing complexity. I think much of this is driven by a combination desire among web programmers to see themselves as "software engineers" and the need to constantly track the most fashionable trends and frameworks so they can one-up their peers.

I recently had to rescue a complex web-framework based system that was an absolute clusterfuck full of basic programming mistakes - the most glaring of which was a complete lack of database transactions in the node backend - but what it did have was every fashionable bell and whistle installed, and extensive reliance on the AWS ecosystem, as if it was designed for millions of concurrent users, whereas a single simple VM running about about 1% load would have done the trick.

And yet all this complexity actually did very little - a simple Rails-based-app would have done it all, at a fraction of the complexity, with far fewer dependencies.