@tilton same. For me, it started back in 1995 when I needed to implement a case management system at work, and I was asking on Usenet what was the best UI toolkit to use. Someone suggested building it as a web application. That sounded crazy to me, an application as a web site? This was really enough that few people had tried it.
So me and a colleague built it in Perl and it worked really well.
That was also one of the last times I enjoyed web development. A few years later I built a web based UI for a chat application. This was around 1998 and I Amherst started to dislike it, but it wasn't until the 00's when it started to get really horrible, and the horror just accelerated until we reach today, and it's just the absolute worst. And what's really remais that people just keep making it even worse, even though you'd assume it couldn't possibly get worse than it was last week, yet every week you get new surprises.