That was reaction as well. CSS 20 years ago was an absolute horror, not just the browser incompatibilities but the sheer difficulty to achieve apparently trivial designs. You could only teach someone how to build a site in a day by strictly leading them along a golden path, as soon as they wanted to take one step off it on their own initiative they’d be met with an impenetrable mass of contorsions and hacks. That difficulty is a big reason why the utopia of a producer-led web never happened, looking back on it as a golden age, or an exemplar of when the web was intuitive, is in my opinion bizarre. Building a well designed simple, content-dominated website has never been easier.