Comments by "Christian Baune" (@programaths) on "Netscape Announces JavaScript | Prime Reacts" video.
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Things have to be contextualized. "Little experience" meant someone who knew how to peek and poke memory and wrote a few classics (snake, Tetris, pacman...) and usually mixing primary with assembly, if not going complete assembly.
The entry barrier was high, and JS did a lot lower it. Each new language lowered the bar.
How many people could create a simple platformer game if they had the only facility to display sprites? Very few considering how people are stumped by game engines that do 99% of the job.
In my first year of CS, we were tasked to make various games in ASM (tasm and nasm), like light-out tanks. And one of the final exams was doing a UI, but if you did your projects correctly, it took a full hour at best. If you didn't, the exam was 8h.
And even the tools lower the entry bar. When I started, I did web pages using Notepad, and the browsers didn't had debug tools. There was the "view source," which would show you what you typed in Notepad.
Also, don't forget that browser did suck in rendering HTML. One misplaced page and your table base layout became funky.
One has to consider how JQuery was a godsend at some point.
Sure, today we do SPA games in the browser. But you've like a catch-up that happens between what you are asked to produce and the advances in ease of use of technologies.
As a stupid example, having a date picker on a web page was quite some work. Then came JQuery, but you still had to find the right JQ plugin. Then browsers implemented type=datetime.
So, now, if you need to input a date, it's a given that you should show a date picker. It looks more complex, but it's infinitely much easier to do.
Even for games, you can program those in Godot and deploy them to the web, thanks to WASM.
Always consider the times when things were created.
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