Ok, I'll give you a serious answer. For an individual shipping a website, anything at all works. I'd guess that half of all websites that have existed are just a single person editing files directly on a webserver without source control, and that's fine.
It's another matter altogether to ship code with tens of thousands of requests per second and a lot of teammates trying to change it simultaneously.
>> ship code with tens of thousands of requests per second
Define "request"
If the "request" is to deliver some static file, that has been solved many years ago with CDNs and server caches and so on.
If the "request" is to do something other than static files, it has nothing to do with Web.
It could be request to your bank's COBOL app or a request to their Java app or to their Node.js app. Nothing to do with Web.
I find it unimaginable that more people are coding than are farming full-time (which is at least hundreds of millions). Given that agriculture is also older by >2 orders of magnitude, I think it's pretty safe to say it has more person-years behind it.
And how many different tech stacks have we been through in that time? I build web apps using very different tools than I used 4 years ago. I read that sentence as comparing web dev on a timeframe to, say, civil engineering.
I have worked at both large companies and small startups, and 'doing what the very big players are doing' is not always the best thing to do. There are just fundamentally different challenges depending on your size.
Sorry, no. People have been shipping, and understanding how to ship web applications for... what, 10, 15, 20 years now?