I also get quite grumpy when people say “you can’t just ‘view source’ like in the good old days”. Not only is that false, modern DOM inspectors are one billion times better for doing the same thing, letting you view generated code, make live changes, directly see what code corresponds to which element, and see all the CSS rules affecting an element and where they come from. And you have a js console, HTTP inspector, debugger and what all else. It is much easier to learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript through experimentation on the modern web.
It’s true that obfuscated code and gratuitous libraries are a barrier to understanding, but then, what would you be trying to understand – how to write bloated code that depends on a ton of crusty libraries to emulate every other crappy site? It was never the case that you could learn programming just by reading the source, except on pages created specifically for didactic purposes (where it is still possible and, again, much easier now).
IMO the one thing that has changed for the worse is that, while there’s much better documentation now, a lot of it is blind-leading-the-blind groupthink. In particular, Stack Overflow answers lean heavily toward the use of gratuitous libraries; jQuery is basically assumed to be a W3C standard at this point. My top tip for anyone trying to learn 90s-style lone-wolf web development would be to use MDN as your authoritative source of information.
