< Webdev seemed so easy, but now it seems so hard...
~bartender I'll take a decaf coffee. Yea yea, I know, gotta work in the morning though.
Started making sites when I was a kid, first couple jobs out of college were PHP sites running Apache and MySQL. Now I wouldn't say that stuff was *easy*, but it was a heck of a lot easier than what we have now.
Local development was as simple as install Apache and MySQL locally. Drop some files in /var/www and you're off to the races. FTP to your server, drop it in, and you're live. Now of course as you scaled things got a little more complicated, but the basic premise was the same. I've worked for multiple medium size companies that did this, wrapped in version control and automation scripts.
And you know what? That method still works, and probably covers most side projects you'd want to build. My last "successful" side project was plain old PHP files (not even Laravel) SFTP'd on a Digital Ocean $5/month VPS. Made a couple hundred dollars a month, good beer money. I built it in a few days and it did the job. Would've taken me months with a modern tech stack, and probably cost more. Not saying this to brag by any means (it went belly up in a few months), but just demonstrating that the old ways still work.
The old ways are a heck of a lot more fun too. You focus on your idea, not tech stacks and frameworks.
I wrote about this on my capsule if you're interested.