Welcome back! The world has changed in a few says and the site reflects that.

Apps have replaced much of the web. People in a local Facebook group were complaining that the county has dropped the app they had for reporting issues (e.g. potholes and similar things that need fixing) so you have to use the website (its a PWA so can be pinned to your home screen, BTW) because its more difficult to navigate to a website (i.e. they are not used to it). Virgin Money have closed their website and you have to use the app or go back to just paper statements etc.

The web has got more complex and fragmented. There are back end developers and front end developers and various complex frameworks within that. Browsers have become an entire app development platform.

Front end developers write a lot less HTML, CSS and vanilla JS and focus on particular frameworks such as react. Then there are the alternatives such as Typescript and WASM.

On the backend people use a wider range of technologies. It used to be dominated by PHP and Perl. Now we have Python, Ruby, Go, Node JS, and many others. As with front end, people know specific frameworks. I am planning my first substantial project in Elixir myself. People use different web servers: Nginx is now the most popular, and there are others such as Caddy that are pretty popular. People use a wider range of databases. MySQL is still very popular, especially with Wordpress, but Postgres, SQLite, and various No SQL DBs are also pretty popular. All this usually gets hosted on AWS or similar instead of your own server/VPS or shared hosting.

I could go on, but I think I have made my point. The role of webmaster has gone, and generalists have been replaced by specialists. If you look at the list of forums they do not really reflect what is popular now but what people who have stuck around use. The advantage of that is that there is a great deal of experience and expertise in a lot of things. If you have a problem configuring Apache or fixing a PHP bug this is a great place to ask. It is also a great place for more general discussions.

Incidentally there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the technology that looks a bit old fashioned. PHP is easy to deploy, and generating HTML on the backend gives you faster loading than big front end frameworks. A server or shared hosting does not tie you to a particular provider the way the hyperscaler clouds do and is a lot cheaper. Simplicity is good and a lot of frameworks are bloated and unnecessarily complex.