It used to be the case, circa the 1990's, that you only saw libraries and example code. Sometimes a "skeleton project". Anything beyond that was exceptional. Ha

It used to be the case, circa the 1990's, that you only saw libraries and example code. Sometimes a "skeleton project". Anything beyond that was exceptional. Having lots of open code available online was a new idea. The thing that made the framework prolific - and it happened in tandem with the rise of Wordpress and other CMS systems - was having so many small, disposable projects. Rather than copy the same skeleton over and over, you could run a cute "new" or "init" command to do the same thing, glom together some plugins, tutorials, and styling, and instantly have something that looked the part - provided you didn't actually test it on a actual business case. Since many web site projects were and are still primarily fancy landing pages, with simple interactivity, frameworks became hugely appealing as a way to ensure a degree of polish and maintainability. But frameworks became marketed as the way to make web apps, and here I think our enthusiasm went astray, since apps pretty consistently need to work through all their infrastructure from first principles, even if they're doing something relatively small. The "microframework" approach of bundling together unrelated libraries or interfacing their functions to a common protocol has remained a popular one, and that is most likely because it better satisfies the needs of app makers.