I totally agree. Todays coders are rather ineffient but it could be a tenth of that. And all the problems are not the web site but the crummy systems it has to access for the data.
Yes, and "modern" tools are usually a step backwards in this regard. There is no way that even a company as large as IBM, with all of its employees typing furiously, could produce a system with 500 million hand written lines of code. "Modern" tools, especially for web coding, are code volcanoes, spewing code out with no intelligence to reuse it. People don't write WSDLs anymore, they just input some values in a tool, and it spits a WSDL out. But even web technologies, which I still maintain moved IT backwards twenty years in technology, there are ways to reuse code. There are Cascading style sheets, there are master pages in .NET, etc. It doesn't have to be generated completely fresh for each web page.