"the basics haven’t changed all that much in the past two decades"
I did some front and back-end development in the mid 00s and almost nothing still applies. Even the HTML standard is different, CSS has gotten much more complicated and JS has changed immensely.
Most importantly, people don't build web sites any more, they use various frameworks to build so-called SPAs.
The front-end is in eternal turmoil and front-end skills expire fast, good thing I got off this carousel.
I don't want to trivialize learning modern frontend development with a clean slate, because it is a long process to get familiar with the tools. But I think those are the details and not the basics. Whether you use html templates rendered server side, or JSX in an SPA, the experience is quite familiar.
I did some front and back-end development in the mid 00s and almost nothing still applies. Even the HTML standard is different, CSS has gotten much more complicated and JS has changed immensely.
Most importantly, people don't build web sites any more, they use various frameworks to build so-called SPAs.
The front-end is in eternal turmoil and front-end skills expire fast, good thing I got off this carousel.