Bootstrapping my old web dev ass after a year of unemployment

I share a similar feeling and a somewhat similar story as well as you do.

I've been making websites actively since I was maybe 14, my first one being at 12 years old with frontpage and uploading it to the municipal's shared FTP host during a summer camp. That's almost 20 years ago for me.

I never really stopped, but I kinda fell off the wagon around the time JS begun to be a thing and we moved from the brand spanking HTML5 and CSS3 to all the new stuff they've bolted on in the last decade or so.

The bar for getting employed in webdev these days are way higher than before. The simple hobbyist with a text editor splicing images into divs or tables just has to be that much better and know so much more to get things done right.

Like you said, it's all for a good reason as well. Tech is much more ubiquitous and just having a website isn't enough when businesses actually need to have backend and frontend functionality on their sites, things that weren't really necessary before.

I moved into full-time design some years ago because that's still largely something you can do without amassing a ton of knowledge. UX design mostly just requires a right mindset for problem solving and there's a lot of research already available, like if design pattern a or b usually works better. So you just have to apply your creativity for the most part. It's not relying on learning a new programming language or fixing some obscure layout bug or making sure your backend API isn't full of security holes.

I'm also saddened by the fact that what we're once a type of needy artsy hobby has been broken into a thousand sub-jobs in which you need to specialize.

It's not entirely impossible to manage the whole stack, but I've yet to see a solid full-stack coder who can actually build a solid backend on a fully configured secured server and manage the devops pipelines while also being a competent frontend developer with an eye for aesthetics and who understands usability.