As a backend dev now working on frontend tasks and primarily with Javscript and Typescript, I think I might have an insight. Server-side engineering is in some

As a backend dev now working on frontend tasks and primarily with Javscript and Typescript, I think I might have an insight. Server-side engineering is in some "well-defined". Software such as the JVM, operating systems behave in a rather well-defined manner, support for features are predictable and by front-end standards, things move slowly, providing time for the developer to understand the platform and use it to his/her best. The browser platforms are a total mess. An insane number of APIs, a combinatorial explosion of what feature is supported on what platform. And web applications move fast. REAL fast. Features are rolled out in days, fixes in hours and frameworks come and go out of fashion in weeks. It is no longer possible for devs to keep up with this tide of change and they seem to end up resorting to do libraries for even trivial tasks, just to get around this problem of fancy APIs and their incorrect implementation and backwards compatibility. And needless to say, every dependency comes with its own burden. Web platforms are kinda a PITA to work with. On one hand Chrome/Google wants to redefine the web to suit their requirements and FF, the only other big enough voice really lags in terms of JS performance. Most devs nowadays end up simply testing on Chrome and leaving it at that. My simple browser benchmarks show anywhere between 5-30% penalty in performance for FF vs Chrome. Unless we slow down the pace of browser API changes and stop releasing a new version of JS every year and forcing developers to adopt them, I guess slow web will be here to stay for a while.