My claim is that this isn't a good representation of the FE culture as a whole - even if there were islands of enlightment out there. I can’t really dispute th

My claim is that this isn't a good representation of the FE culture as a whole - even if there were islands of enlightment out there. I can’t really dispute that since I don’t have any useful statistical evidence. All I can say is that in my experience there were mostly two types of people working on front-ends to run in browsers in the early days: Web designers who learned programming, and programmers who learned the basic Web technologies and/or plugins. (Today, with the industry being somewhat more mature, I’d say there’s a third group, who come straight into full-on front-end programming of JS-based web UIs at the same time as they’re learning HTML and CSS.) Crucially, this means you have some web developers who have broader programming experience and/or formal training, and others whose knowledge mostly comes from online tutorials and QA sites and from the knowledge and culture passed on by their peers. The former type probably have some understanding of software architecture for more substantial applications, and might well have had a reasonably systematic data model, separated business rules from the rendering(s) of the underlying data, and so on. The latter type often aren’t aware of these concepts and tend to write much more hacky code — such as keeping application state in the DOM — because they don’t know any better. Adopting a comprehensive framework can mitigate that lack of knowledge to some extent, which I suspect is a big part of why the heavyweight frameworks caught on in front-end work just as they did in desktop UI work earlier, but ultimately there’s still no substitute for knowing what you’re doing. Today the same type of people who used to keep their application state in an ad-hoc mix of scattered variables and the DOM are trying to build their entire application architecture with React components and either scattering the state and business logic throughout those components or, in some cases, adopting a heavyweight data management architecture like Redux instead.