Web programming has never been wholly controlled by a platform owner. I think that's the main difference from any traditional environment that might come to mind; Unix has its traditions, so do Windows and Mac. This is even the case for mobile. In the years when IE was the only browser anyone used, one could also hope to come to grips with its buggy CSS implementation, but that is past too, and in the meantime the backend was still churning from Java and the classic LAMP stack towards Rails and Python.
This is the end result of uncoordinated, path dependent "bazaar" dynamics where the core technologies are open, yet keep accumulating cruft, and are subject to regular proxy wars between large entities. The solutions today are better in that they are easier along certain axes - you can make a cookie-cutter landing page out of the box with Bootstrap, or add some interactive data viz by employing D3. For any random one-off there is an npm package that depends on 50 other packages. They mostly aren't there to help you architect your own thing in a self-consistent way, though - that's too much of a "vitamin" and not enough of a "bandaid" to be marketable.
I'm not sure if the bazaar really applies. In the bazaar you have a range of options and can pick and choose what suits you, but on the web we are seemingly stuck on a few base tools (html js, css) that have so much momentum that the will never go away. You don't get a restriction like that on the server or desktop side.
That's just the platform. If you look around the operating-system bazaar, you still have some basic notions that are shared among all of them (e.g. all their VFS look basically the same). That's the role fulfilled by HTML/JS/CSS: a hardware abstraction layer, if you will.
This is the end result of uncoordinated, path dependent "bazaar" dynamics where the core technologies are open, yet keep accumulating cruft, and are subject to regular proxy wars between large entities. The solutions today are better in that they are easier along certain axes - you can make a cookie-cutter landing page out of the box with Bootstrap, or add some interactive data viz by employing D3. For any random one-off there is an npm package that depends on 50 other packages. They mostly aren't there to help you architect your own thing in a self-consistent way, though - that's too much of a "vitamin" and not enough of a "bandaid" to be marketable.