This is a good resource that will walk you through the cutting edge web development technologies, starting from the very basics and progressing to the more complex matters in the end. Highly recommended.
Web is a large domain of knowledge. It isn't particularly hard in terms of math, algorithms or mysterious unknown proprietary APIs. But there is a lot to figure out. What parts are important, what parts can I skip.
If by basics you mean HTML, CSS and JS. Sure. Good start. But you could also start with a framework and learn from the middle and out or the top down.
Not everything has to be learned bottom up.
Either way. It is not trivial.
The numbers speak for themselves. I don't need to convince you. There are more web developers than in any other programming field. So it must have some property that makes it easy to get started or at least some kind of incentive to make people go through the initial hurdle.
Anything worth studying is slightly overwhelming at first, but to say that everything continues to be overwhelming once you know the basics is wrong. Knowing a little bit of the grammar and some words will help you understand better Mandarine. Not knowing anything about the language will make it appear as some alien technology.
No skill starts growing at the middle. Nobody teaches mathematics by starting with abstract concepts. We don't learn new spoken languages by studying literature from the get-go. So getting the pedagogics right is part of the success.
Should I hand-type static HTML to do this? Is that what modern web developers typically do? Will learning HTML, CSS, and JS teach me how to use a backend? Which backend language should I pick? Should I use a database? Which one? Or should I use AWS? Is all I need HTML, CSS, and JS?
PHP, is that a good backend starting point? That seems to be pretty fundamental, since over half of all websites use it. A LAMP stack, right? No? What about Python? Ruby? C? Rust? Arc? Elm?
Should I use Node? If so, what is the typical Node setup?
Should I use webassembly? That's a fundamental and new browser technology.
How do I compress and minify code and images to be served? A makefile, right? That's the typical way to build things in my software world.