I miss it. On the javascript side there was just jquery and a mountain of vanilla js that everyone could at least understand (and no npm dependency issues, ES6+ weirdness, etc) and on the PHP side, all built-in functions were in the global scope (easy to CTRL+F on a single page at a time when search endpoints were quite slow), there were (virtually) no web frameworks (at least I didn't use any until after 2009), and no package management to worry about unless you were doing something weird and/or wrangling with wordpress. As a tween and young teen I had plenty of small web design clients.. local businesses, photographers, etc., and I could build sites 100% from scratch starting from a photoshop mockup to custom PHP/HTML/CSS/JS, 100% no packages or other people's code. Packages have done a ton for us, for sure, but I truly miss those days and feel like we've lost something we'll never get back.

Back then it was actually quite possible to build an entire website or "app" as we call them now from first principles just banging your head against HTML/CSS/JS and whatever server side language you were using. Then the internet grew up, security issues became more prevalent, packages, other people's code, dependency hell, "futures", "promises", server state and client state management, shadow dom, reactivity, etc etc.