I may be showing my age, but for me "full-stack" has always meant someone who can program from device drivers ans OS code all the way to the application, not a web developer who can do both the JS front-end and web app server backend.
There's some generational drift at place, for sure. I have heard "Full Stack" to mean JavaScript FE + service layer BE in a lot of the line-of-business world. I assume it is mostly a reflection of where widespread economic activity for software development takes place. The vast majority of companies aren't writing device drivers or kernel modules.
It's kind of like reading old (pre-XP) texts about testing that refer to testing a program in a family as "unit" testing. Not technically wrong because it all depends on how you define a unit, but definitely a sign of linguistic and economic drift.
I am old, too, but for me the term "full stack" only showed up during the last decade or so, in connection with web programming, meaning "frontend and backend". I never heard anyone using it your way. Actually I think I never met anyone coding devices drivers as well as GUIs :-)
Yeah from a distance it seems the thing that has happened that significantly changed things is that JavaScript became an acceptable backend language. So the split between people who wrote JS on the front side of things, and people who wrote Java/Ruby/Python/C# (or, err, PHP or... going back... Perl) on the backend has mostly vanished. And the new term became "fullstack" which, I dunno, it's kind of a funny term.
Having been out of web-facing things for a long time, I think I'd feel pretty alien being dropped into a TypeScript-on-Node codebase. I'd have no problem picking it up having played with it a bit over the years, but it still strikes me as a bit odd. And I find the JS frameworks out there like React etc absolutely terrifyingly overwrought.
The only way a bespoke component model framework works is if everyone adopts it. All the multitude of Java component-based web rendering systems failed.
Luckily for react everybody did basically adopt it so their component model did not fail.
It is always funny to watch people mock Java in the 1.0 version of their framework and some other thing and then come back and look 5 years later and their stack is easily or greater and complexity than the old Java stacks.
Well in general, I've noticed 'computer scientist', 'software engineer', etc has come to be synonymous with 'web dev'. I'm an AI compiler engineer, and when I introduce myself to people who I meet who themselves are web dev engineers (which is the majority), they'll ask me 'what framework' I use (obviously supposed to mean React, Vue, etc). No judgement.... just something I've noticed
