I know someone who used to make a living writing erotica for the Kindle store and experimented with using inklewriter to create interactive, CYOA-style stories. For a small donation to a charity, the inklewriter devs would compile a story to a static .epub which could then be published on the Kindle store.
He discovered that the compilation process essentially generated every possible page of text. For example, he would allow the reader to choose the color of the protagonist's hair (blonde, brunette, redhead) and then refer to a $hairColor variable throughout the text. Every page that used that variable would have to be generated three times, one for each possible value. This resulted in a text that was many hundreds or thousands of pages long, even for quite a short story.
At the time, Kindle used a very simple payment model based on the number of pages read. When a reader selected a path, they would jump forward hundreds of pages at a time, each one counting as a read page, and by the end Kindle tracked them as having read thousands of pages. Using this system, he went from earning 2 or 3 dollars for a cover-to-cover reading to literally hundreds of dollars per reading. Of course, they caught on to this and modified the payment policy as well as the thoroughness of moderation and the gravy train ended.
Thanks for the comments! I don't think the issue is ability so much as inclination. People see the web as something to consume rather than participate in so modifying a website doesn't cross their minds at all. I think with a little rebranding and some tweaking for non-devs devtools would be a fantastic way for anybody to start off slow, changing colors and so on, and gradually work their way up to more complicated CSS concepts, or even JS. I think if this functionality was right in front of people rather than being hidden deep in a menu behind the name Developer Tools, it's entirely possible people would take to it without much trouble.
He discovered that the compilation process essentially generated every possible page of text. For example, he would allow the reader to choose the color of the protagonist's hair (blonde, brunette, redhead) and then refer to a $hairColor variable throughout the text. Every page that used that variable would have to be generated three times, one for each possible value. This resulted in a text that was many hundreds or thousands of pages long, even for quite a short story.
At the time, Kindle used a very simple payment model based on the number of pages read. When a reader selected a path, they would jump forward hundreds of pages at a time, each one counting as a read page, and by the end Kindle tracked them as having read thousands of pages. Using this system, he went from earning 2 or 3 dollars for a cover-to-cover reading to literally hundreds of dollars per reading. Of course, they caught on to this and modified the payment policy as well as the thoroughness of moderation and the gravy train ended.