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