And knowing the differences between various browsers meant negotiating whether the layout being 3px off on Internet Explorer was acceptable, or whether we should ship different CSS files for different browsers to fix this discrepancy

I think there might have been two overlapping periods, but it definitely started out as you said. What I wonder is, will AI increase frontend churn, or calm it down? (More churn would be, new frontends because of new frontend frameworks, AI accelerated, less churn would be, because AI is trained on what existed before)

I think I also reject the premise of the article, that frameworks caused frontends dev to de-skill. For sure, that happened to some extent. But it also caused a lot of frontend devs to be incredibly skilled in their chosen niche. (React for instance.)

nostalgia is one hell of a drug