This is because the new wave of developers doesn't have any connection to the old scene to see how absurd this state is. What would be trite and unimpressive in the context of what was done decades ago on far less powerful hardware with far more low-level languages is instead very impressive to those that are used to incredibly complex runtimes (e.g. browsers and modern operating systems) and have performance issues as a result. I think computing needs a low-level renaissance. "The web" is no panacea; to the contrary, it's going to keep expanding in unavoidable complexity to negate all improvements in algorithms and hardware over time.