I only disagree on web development. It was never easy. The web always always a mess, and nothing really worked. Today it's a mess, but you can make it work if you know what you are doing.
But yes, looks like the web was a trendsetter that pushed things into becoming harder without any good reason. Or maybe the web was just following the trend of the toolmakers all going out business at the early 00's (thanks a lot to Microsoft).
Ironically - given the article we're commenting on - a lot of the early problems with the web were solved, and I hesitate to say it, solved well by Flash. Its insecurity is what really pushed us away from it (well, and that it was a closed sourced Adobe project)
I miss the days when JQuery was the only JS library a person needed to know to do professional web dev. I stuck with web dev through the peak of Struts, but the constant changing of frameworks with (imo) minimal benefit to user experience pushed me to things besides web dev.
But yes, looks like the web was a trendsetter that pushed things into becoming harder without any good reason. Or maybe the web was just following the trend of the toolmakers all going out business at the early 00's (thanks a lot to Microsoft).