The only time I ever needed dreamweaver: I found an open source imagemap of the US states and I needed to scale it to match my background image of the US provided by an art director. Dreamweaver let me see all the s easily. Maybe there was another way to do it. Fun fact: the art director wanted states to grow on hover, but acquiesced to having them change color when I pointed out how impossible it would be to click on Rhode Island if you'd hovered Massachusetts first. I don't even know how I would have done the grow effect, tbh.

My web dev experience began right before ES6, when browsers still did not do parallel asset loads and so spritesheets were common

Why could you not have defined elements overlayed using high z index that were clickable, like invisible divs?

Server side image maps predate javascript. They were in early versions of Mosaic.

Client side image maps and the script element were (AFAICT) both introduced in Netscape 2.

Even when scripting was introduced, you didn't necessarily have the ability to move elements around freely on the page. I think (but I'm not certain) that it wasn't until Netscape 4 era that you had enough layout primitives to implement the multi-layer positioning approach to custom clickable areas.

With plain HTML you could have done this, though?

But only square hit targets then (until clip paths much later). Image maps supported polygons and circles. And position absolute is still a few years after image maps.

It wasn't just the use of absolute positioning that wouldn't have worked. CSS didn't even exist yet.

Ahh that makes a lot of sense -- thanks!