The best way to learn is to work with a master and then bypass the master. Paid courses are only good if you can stay on top of them and work on them daily. Building a app, website or program of some kind requires you to learn the newest, best, and fast. I would suggest that if you want to learn programming to learn one program language first. Mine was HTML, then I learn CSS and JavaScript. After I learn Python, and PHP. When I started to work on servers, building networks and databases, I had to learn from someone that has done it millions of times, and I had to learn with the pressure of I can't mess up. Every time I had worked with any personal server equipment and it does not work, I give up. Building it for other people forced me to fix any problem that comes my way. Read a lot of documentation, don't be scared to mess up and always ask questions. Hashnode, stack overflow and many other forms are constantly open when I am working on a new project because, someone else has done and done it well. Make sure you make good contact that you trust so, you can always ask them a question that you deemed stupid, or something you can't push through.

I really hope so but I think it is unlikely. With the progression of programming it's likely that it will become a whole new language at one point or become obsolete and be replaced with something new and faster.

Vagrant is awesome, works easy and fast. As well Ubuntu desktop is Ubuntu server with a GUI. Spin up a LAMP server and run it in the background. Then point your web server directory to your working directory. Then develop.

I believe that we haven't made modern front end over complicate but, we have made the development of front end overcomplicated. When I started working with front end design, I used a HTML, CSS and JavaScript file to make my front end. Now you have to create a development server, then you have all these "plugins" to make your development server faster and easier to use ( faster and easier are used loosely because most of the time it takes longer to set all of that up than the front end itself). I think that the development tools have not come far enough for developers so, we use so/so tools to get the job done that we spend more time hacking then actually getting our job done. I think that JavaScript has come a far way but it still is not far enough. As well documentation for these tools are no where were they should be.