I too spend 90% of my time on the backend (Node.js mostly). But when I do work on the front-end, I feel that I can get the same relative static comfort by using

I too spend 90% of my time on the backend (Node.js mostly). But when I do work on the front-end, I feel that I can get the same relative static comfort by using the most hardened API available to me: the DOM. I get that its pretty verbose and historically has been far from perfect, particularly in the early-to-mid 2000s, but I really have trouble understanding this allergy new devs have to the native web platform. Its not that hard to be productive and you can do so without having a nightmarish preprocessing toolchain. And by bootstrapping yourself to these framework/library ecosystems, you usually don't get a sense of the problems they venture to solve. Everything becomes a magic black box. As an aside: libraries have never seemed like the true pain point for new FE devs. My anecdotal observation is that the wheels fall of the wagon when it comes to application/API design. The obvious corollary here of course is that you can easily build a very poorly designed React/Redux app. We're just trading one problem space for another, in my view.