"the basics haven’t changed all that much in the past two decades"

I did some front and back-end development in the mid 00s and almost nothing still applies. Even the HTML standard is different, CSS has gotten much more complicated and JS has changed immensely.

Most importantly, people don't build web sites any more, they use various frameworks to build so-called SPAs.

The front-end is in eternal turmoil and front-end skills expire fast, good thing I got off this carousel.