> I wonder what drove this needless and pretentious complexity ?
> Was it the inflow of too many mediocre graduates that needed help preventing themselves from writing buggy programs?
IMHO? Pretty much. That end result is linked to the desire to democratize programming. That was a common talking point back in the 90s-00's. They wanted normal, non-programming people to be able to make websites by themselves without programmers. They wanted to be more inclusive and make programming more accessible to the masses. They thought one day programming would be taught in schools right next to english and they'd use that skill every day to program their computers themselves. The common phrase used was "programming is the new literacy."
They did not succeed. To make the programming tools and languages easier to use, they had to add complicated abstractions. Objects. Exceptions. Garbage Collection. Types had to go. As a result, programming got a lot easier to make simple things, but a whole hell of a lot more complicated to engineer solid, reliable systems.
A lot of the comments in this very comments section show a great deal of fear at not using a framework to program even a simple website. That's a great example of the kind of mindset we've cultivated over the past 30 years. We're so worried about how to utilize an ever growing pool of barely computer literate junior developers that we've Harrison Bergeron'd our best and brightest.