What ever happened to developers who are capable of doing both concerns? Is this an unreasonable position to have now?
People underestimate either side. You can get very very deep in both of them, it's no longer just about putting HTML elements on the page, or sending back a response. They've both become oceans, from exploring 3D content to computing on the edge to an entire orchestration of tools to manage as little downtime as possible.
So far what I've been seeing is whole teams that "don't believe in full-stack developers" so they box and typecast people who try to do both.
You gotta send the right message from the top to change this. I've had some FE developers that picked up BE and are doing great at it.
Would you expect these new backend folks to be able to, take, say, a clean linux install and build a relatively full stack on top of that - Apache config, firewall, that sort of thing?
I remember this changing around 2015 or so, when I started getting the first batch of devs that only knew how to deploy using the one single way they learned, and never updated that. I specifically remember one dev that was coding for 3, 4 years saying his dream was to make and deploy his own website. He never had a personal project.
Which is perfectly fine, don't get me wrong. The part I'm not a fan of is the culture against people who can do multiple things well. Which, funny enough, I am required to do in my job (I have to do most DevOps, plus mentor frontend and backend devs).
Tables for layout isn’t just an example of a dated web site, it is also an accessibility nightmare which no professional web developer would allow to leave their localhost.