No, it definitely has got worse, I've been doing this 15 years, the sweet spot was the Rails revolution. Before that a lot of frameworks were a bit too much magic, and not enough understanding of how browsers, http and html worked.
Simple MVC stacks went to all languages, jQuery front-ends doing enough but not a lot. JavaScript enhanced easy to reason about server-side stacks.
You used to spend a couple of days a year, yes YEAR, mucking around with tooling. Now it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say you spend a day or so a week fighting some part of your stack because it's been over-engineered.
IDEs can't keep up so you have to run inscrutable command line tools that fail if you have deviated even slightly from whatever error-prone rain-dance some moron claiming 'best practice' has forced into the build process.
Programming used to be about writing code to solve business problems. The shift to DevOps has been a massive productivity drain and most stacks are now incredibly brittle.
The worse part has been debugging, which you touch upon. Native calls, simple call stacks, easy error logging. All gone.
Moving everything into hard to debug http calls has been a disastrous productivity sink.
The irony has been that as languages have got significantly better our productivity has actually dropped massively because of the ridiculous amounts of over-engineering in "modern" code bases.
I recently worked on a project with 2 devs that took 3 months with a modern stack. The prototype in a standard MVC stack I'd made to demo to the client took 2 days.
It's utterly ridiculous and sometimes I feel like the boy in the story about the emperor with no clothes.
Simple MVC stacks went to all languages, jQuery front-ends doing enough but not a lot. JavaScript enhanced easy to reason about server-side stacks.
You used to spend a couple of days a year, yes YEAR, mucking around with tooling. Now it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say you spend a day or so a week fighting some part of your stack because it's been over-engineered.
IDEs can't keep up so you have to run inscrutable command line tools that fail if you have deviated even slightly from whatever error-prone rain-dance some moron claiming 'best practice' has forced into the build process.
Programming used to be about writing code to solve business problems. The shift to DevOps has been a massive productivity drain and most stacks are now incredibly brittle.
The worse part has been debugging, which you touch upon. Native calls, simple call stacks, easy error logging. All gone.
Moving everything into hard to debug http calls has been a disastrous productivity sink.
The irony has been that as languages have got significantly better our productivity has actually dropped massively because of the ridiculous amounts of over-engineering in "modern" code bases.
I recently worked on a project with 2 devs that took 3 months with a modern stack. The prototype in a standard MVC stack I'd made to demo to the client took 2 days.
It's utterly ridiculous and sometimes I feel like the boy in the story about the emperor with no clothes.