I think Google made everything different. The moment people started competing for the search rankings, the web became serious business. Everything is driven by SEO, KPIs and tracking these days.
This sentence explains the issue in modern web development: "Browsers are only capable of executing JavaScript, so when there are limitations in the JavaScript language, it’s not like you can just use a different language; you have to work with what you have."
Yes, you can use a different language. You can use a back-end language and let the server do what it does best. PHP, Ruby .Net, Python (and more) are still very much alive and relevant.
I understand what the writer meant to say with the sentence, and the specific limitations to JS. But the real issues are in a notion that JavaScript is the one language to rule them all. That is very misguided view (IMHO) that took over the web.