Oh, I'm not necessarily talking about going back to old server-side stacks, more that the heavy client-side stacks seem to get used all the time even if the pro

Oh, I'm not necessarily talking about going back to old server-side stacks, more that the heavy client-side stacks seem to get used all the time even if the problem didn't need them. If you're writing something really horrendously complicated, yes, some sort of framework will help. If it's a little throwaway tool for internal or casual use, it's usually perfectly feasible to do the whole thing in one or two hundred lines of HTML+CSS+script. No tooling, no dependencies. It's so much quicker and so much less painful, and yet bizarrely people look at you like you're a wizard because the whole thing is 5k uncompressed and doesn't even need a webserver.