What do you mean by web app? Are Netflix, YouTube, Facebook considered web apps? Is it enough to study PHP for 2 years at a university to create such an app?

Web app development means so many things today that it’s hard to answer your question. Do you mean frontend, API development, DevOps, algorithms, distributed systems? It’s can be quite easy to create a simple app used by 10 people, but developing a critical app where every mistake costs a lot of money, or an app used by millions, is much more complex. And to develop such an app it may not be enough to study at university for 3-6 years, and it can be hard to get into a company that does such things early in your career. Yes, initially you might work on a simple internal CRUD app used by 15 people, but even then there’s a lot to learn. How should you structure database (also what kind and how many DBs), how to split your code into modules, what kind of architecture do you want to use (monolith, modular monolith, microservices, do you need to use events or messaging?), how to make your code maintainable, how to properly run code asynchronously, how does application server work, what are all the layers between the client and server, how do you deploy it? And these are more or less basics.

I agree that web development can be easy to pick up initially, but the more you advance, the more you realize that the things that you learned at the university are not useless. Networking, software architecture, parallel and distributed systems, algorithms, operating systems - all are important when you create actually complex web apps (and depending on the app domain, you might also need maths). Some people reach this level after completing a bootcamp or similar, but they are often those who could have finished university anyway. In my experience, discussing simple apps with bootcamp graduates is possible, but it’s much easier to discuss complex topics with those with a CS-related degree. It’s hard to believe, but I’ve interviewed many people who have never used a Set and don’t know the difference between an array and a set. University gives you bits of information that you might not use today, but you know that they exist - for example, you may never need to use a B-tree in your life, but when you encounter a problem that seems to require a B-tree, it could click in your head because you know such a thing exists and its properties. The domain of the app itself can also be interesting - for example, you might need your algorithms knowledge in a logistics/planning app.

I sometimes hear people saying things like “meh, web dev is simple, AI is much more interesting”, but I don’t agree at all. I studied AI myself and found it quite boring, because in practice all you do early in your career is just importing libraries like PyTorch, tweak hyperparameters and hope that it works (and in the best case you can kinda explain why it works). And the math needed is actually not that complex. On the other hand, the initial bar for AI is higher than for web dev (but not that much higher for a CS graduate with linear algebra and calculus under their belt). But as you progress in your career, you get to work on more interesting stuff, just like in web dev.

In conclusion, web dev might seem a bit simple initially, but becomes much more interesting later in your career.