I agree with both your points.

As for the proposed name "Web Developers", I wonder whether that would sound like only the code side of looking after a website. To me personally, "Webmasters" also sounds narrow - it would make me think of only the operations side and not the code side.

As the scope seems intended to be both the code and the operations sides, I wonder if there is a term that would make clear that both are included.

Well, it used to be that websites were static, and many webmasters were also HTML devs, because given the simplicity of HTML it made little sense to divide labor there. These days, "webapps" seems to be ever growing, and typically "running" the site and building the webapp are very different things. "Web dev" tends to refer to the former only. The "webmasters" of today are not likely to write their own webapp with JS, and it's much more common to simply use existing tools to run a site.

Since JS and other frontend technologies are already covered by Software Development, it should be excluded from webmasters. Webmasters should include other things, like configuring nginx/caddy, setting up various open source servers/templates, DNS, hosting, SEO, content creation.

Being on topic in another community doesn't necessarily make something off topic in this one - a few of the existing communities have overlaps. If you think that software development questions should be off topic here, it's worth raising that as a separate question to get a discussion going and see what answer the community supports.

trichoplax‭ Wait, how's that gonna work? We'd have the same questions duplicated here and there. That seems kind of redundant to me. I thought it was assumed that if something is on topic in one place, it's not in others.

Being on topic in 2 places doesn't mean it has to be asked in both places. It also doesn't hurt if it is asked in both places.

The benefit of having separate communities for different subject areas is that voting and feedback from a narrower collection of experts is more useful, and answers will be from the perspective of people focused on that particular subject area. None of this is dependent on the question never being asked elsewhere. In some cases a question from 1 person may benefit in different ways from 2 different communities. In other cases 2 different people may ask the same question for different reasons, from 2 different communities. The answers to one may not be of interest to the other.