I think it's kind of sad and insane that people seem to have forgotten (or came into the industry too late to know) that it's possible to build fun and useful things that way.
I built a forum/social site that way back in the day and it was active and profitable for 10+ years.
It also feels like the art of optimization has been lost.
For small and medium sites a lot of today's crazy build pipeline and distributed asset hosting complexity can be sidestepped if you just focus on optimization and making sure that cache expiration dates for your assets are set correctly.
On the server side, it is considered "normal" these days to have maybe 50+ database queries per request. People then reach for expensive and complex database solutions (clustering, etc) before doing simple app-layer optimizations like caching.
I built a forum/social site that way back in the day and it was active and profitable for 10+ years.
It also feels like the art of optimization has been lost.
For small and medium sites a lot of today's crazy build pipeline and distributed asset hosting complexity can be sidestepped if you just focus on optimization and making sure that cache expiration dates for your assets are set correctly.
On the server side, it is considered "normal" these days to have maybe 50+ database queries per request. People then reach for expensive and complex database solutions (clustering, etc) before doing simple app-layer optimizations like caching.