I think, as a community, we all have to make a mental note, that this shit is tough but with struggle comes the reward. We could learn a lot from pro athletes. Our general rule that we are "lazy" is so bad. You should not be lazy. Do the damn thing. It will be hard, but you are doing it for a reward.
It is super hard to remember that fact, when you are deep down in Node.js trying to figure out how streaming and event loop goes on. But thats where notes and big posters come in :)
Totally agree about the part where people who can do CSS and HTML and know that '.htaccess' is the file to configure stuff for your Wordpress website call themselves "web devs". And I think people from the engineering world look at those people ( since there is a lot of those people) and put a lot of hate on that title.
I know this for a fact because I know a few people that are calling themselves just that "web devs". And when ever I get into talking about anything more advanced then CSS and PHP if statments they get lost. Things like concurrency, microservices, encryption etc. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong to be that person, everybody starts there, but you need to evolve.
The conveyor belt metaphor is one of the best that I have ever heard.
It's fine to start out with anything, I did pascal/visual basic in high school. Then did Java/PHP in college.
First year of college I did contract work in PHP and in WordPress. It was fun the first year or so and I love that I could have that "instant gratification" moments that PHP is famous for.
Then as I grew and learned about things like concurrency, algorithms, HTTP, networking I found myself wondering off to other languages such as Ruby. Then I learned Ruby and now for a year already am doing Rails and Angular and truly enjoy it.
The thing to note here is back in a day when I was doing PHP , I heard a lot from community members and other software engineers saying something like "PHP SUCKS" and stuff like that, but I did not care because everything I wanted to build in that time I could do with procedural PHP or some OOP php or some Wordpress magic. When I realized and knew `why` I want to learn other stuff everything became clear.