I didn’t leave it because of the compile steps, but because the extra layers, despite all their downsides, were far from able to hide the underlying impedance mismatch.
I left over a decade ago and went back to low level kernel programming.
I left over a decade ago and went back to low level kernel programming.
In my opinion, everything else since is an attempt to find a way out of that mess.
I was there when the web happened, though only watching from the side lines. I also remember that there were more fitting approaches early on, but a lot of them suffered under the Internet's explosive growth: Some of the "sane" stuff at least would have needed concerted efforts for plans that have to be executed over time. But the web was already a thing, and people desperately wanted to do certain things with it. The quick hacks for that were available immediately, and they were cool: "Hah, look what I can do. You can now get a travel itinerary through your city's public transport system from the World Wide Web. Isn't that amazing?" (At the time, it was.)
I'm not saying you cannot have joy in web development. As you say, it just wasn't for me. For the reasons above.