It's self-fueling phenomenon and reasons are plenty. My random thoughts: - Everyone who thinks about themselves as doing "frontend" needs to do hot tech of the

It's self-fueling phenomenon and reasons are plenty. My random thoughts: - Everyone who thinks about themselves as doing "frontend" needs to do hot tech of the day because that's what everyone talks about in the internets (FOMO). If you leave the race, you can't fill your CV with buzzwords and won't find a job in a few years (would you hire a Java developer who still writes Java 4?) - New people come in and that's the reality they start with and it feels normal. They never wrote a clean piece of HTML+CSS by hand. - When you're in a company where all people have they minds set up on a given tech because of the reasons above, it's impossible to suggest an alternative tech to the currently fashionable one. You can't tell dozens of people to do a career suicide. Anyway it's typically a very small group (or a single dev) who choose the tech stack and architecture for new projects, and they typically have a very limited time to do so. Going with the flow is the "safe" option. - Hiring: you don't want to use unpopular unsexy tech, because you won't find candidates, who will fear to take it to not work in a non-future-proof tech stack (COBOL job anyone?) - Sometimes you just have to do something complex which requires a ton of JS anyway (any highly interactive widgets/apps) and then having a single well-understood framework is better than gluing together many things in a random way. - Finally, doing complex stuff in a huge team is tricky. To make stuff not collapse, the developer experience is generally favored over user experience.