Comment by The_Colonel
9 months ago
Exactly. What people also miss that the complexity grew considerably because of the need to cover many more "edge" cases. 30 years ago, you could assume a rough display size (fixed layouts) and DPI (no scaling needed), assume ASCII / ISO-8859-1, assume that the user is able-bodied and doesn't need accessibility features, target just DOS etc.
There is also a lot of accidental complexity which you might be able to get rid of only by BC breaks, unfortunately.
Don't forget, back in the early days of the WWW, web pages weren't mostly annoying ads. These days, this is very, very important, so we dedicate a lot of computing resources to it.