Javascript was fast enough back then to make much more complex applications than most people were making back then but the complexity was mind-numbing, particularly considering that you didn't have tools like async/await to help manage asynchronous communications.

I built frameworks for managing the flow of data in that kind of application and didn't feel it was so catastrophic when Microsoft banned synchronous communications in Silverlight... I knew what to do.

Having had that experiment I tend to laugh at today's Javascript frameworks because they work really hard but aren't suitable for the kind of apps I built back then.

Sometimes it seems there is a lot of "lost" technology in software like the production rules systems of the 1980s, CASE systems and Lotus notes from the 1990s, Google docs in the 2000s that are like Stonehenge or the Egyptian Pyramids seen from the state of programming in 2023.