What you're saying is true, but it's a tautology. It doesn't matter what technology you use, your job will always be "just as bad". As a developer it's your job to push the limits of what you can accomplish until it starts to hurt a little. That will always be true of the web: we'll push what browser capabilities we try to harness all the way to the point where compatibility work really starts to burn.
But if you look at things in absolute terms, what you're saying is crazy. I can build, in a week, something that is better in every way than Gmail was when it was originally released, that works on a larger proportion of devices. That's progress
Your subjective experience might be that you still work in the weeds but that's because you're insanely more productive for the same effort than you were 8 years ago.
When I read the OP's comment all I could think about was what it would be like writing a decent web app in the bad ol' IE days if it also had to work in most of those crappy symbian flip phone browsers. I agree with you completely. Meeting expectations today is really tough, but the expectations are much higher in most ways.
Indeed. As a contractor I often have to use the latest and greatest because project leads read about it somewhere and designers go wild. Which means that the work is not significantly easier because the goal-posts just moved.
But for smaller clients that I have full control over, I usually take a subset of functionality that I know is stable and consistent by now, and I only go for bleeding-edge stuff if the budget allows it (because, of course, it is fun to play with shiny new stuff).
But if you look at things in absolute terms, what you're saying is crazy. I can build, in a week, something that is better in every way than Gmail was when it was originally released, that works on a larger proportion of devices. That's progress
Your subjective experience might be that you still work in the weeds but that's because you're insanely more productive for the same effort than you were 8 years ago.