Been building sites since 1996. What's the point anymore?
First off, I'm "old" for a programmer. I started coding in 3rd grade (1982 on a TRS-80 III). I started designing and coding websites in 1996 after the Army. Built some truly original UI/UX over the years, especially for General Motors. But then Wordpress won the CMS wars and the template industry made EVERYTHING look the same for everyone. Header, navbar, hero slider, three column icon-laden sections, copy block, repeat. I was a Flash developer and animator so long as THAT lived, but Jobs killed it. I was there when AJAX and JQuery hit the scene, but now, what's the point?!
No one wants a hand-coded custom site when their nephew could throw up a Wix in 30 minutes. No one wants to pay for quality when a simple Envato search gets them 90% closer to what they wanted anyway. Do I abandon my old LAMP stack and learn MEAN? Or MERN? Is it worth getting into React? I've been using MySQL so long, Mongo seems like a foreign concept. Is it worth even being a "web developer" in the era of bland templates and ubiquitous PowerPointy HTML5 parallax movement and ridiculous client turnaround times based on a Wordpress template their cousin did one time on Media Temple.
Honestly, is this even an industry anymore or just a hobby for those of us enamored with the "old" way, the "hard" way of hand coding and custom UI? At 49, is it worth learning a new language, a new stack? Would Python be worth learning for anything other than my dusty Raspberry Pi 4? Why are we even here anymore?
Anyone want to help out an OG webdev make some life decisions?