But at the same time, that enforced simplicity accommodated a degree of accessibility to the web -- at a genuinely fundamental level -- that the web's punctuated evolution has continued to obfuscate since.
You can still build a site with raw HTML and nothing else now. But where will you host it? Find a tilde club instance I guess? But you have to be part of the right technological in-groups even to know what that is.
Which begs the question of how necessary this tech knowledge has to be.