I don't think you can attribute it to a "decline in HN", I think it's better attributed to the rise of a whole stack of languages, frameworks and software heavily optimized for web development, and the decline in hosting costs for any platform.
Today you can spin up an EC2 box for pennies an hour, even with Windows, and push a new build live or publish a new site just minutes later - very different to 16 years ago.
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I don't think you can attribute it to a "decline in HN", I think it's better attributed to the rise of a whole stack of languages, frameworks and software heavily optimized for web development, and the decline in hosting costs for any platform.
Today you can spin up an EC2 box for pennies an hour, even with Windows, and push a new build live or publish a new site just minutes later - very different to 16 years ago.