Interestingly, even as a one time front-end specialist, I'm leaning the something same direction this author did: the complexity introduced along with front-end

Interestingly, even as a one time front-end specialist, I'm leaning the something same direction this author did: the complexity introduced along with front-end frameworks/tooling treads near (and in some cases beyond) a border past which I stop feeling like working with JS itself is a win. The more the development process treats the browser as a runtime target for generated code, the less point I see in sticking with JS -- or even augmented versions of it -- as a source language. And I like JavaScript. Of course, I don't much like Java, so that's not where I'm likely to go, but I am struck with what the author demonstrated here regarding that as an option. Like the author, I'm very curious about something like Elm; if I'm going somewhere with a type system, I'd like to go further along the spectrum of benefits types can provide. And I'm also not sure we've reached the apex of possibilities of working more directly with HTML/CSS/JS, but that's highly domain/application dependent and another topic.