I think this could be reformulated: the result of backend development has less immediately visible consequences, thus more potential for catastrophic errors hen

I think this could be reformulated: the result of backend development has less immediately visible consequences, thus more potential for catastrophic errors hence requires more testing and planning in advance (whereas UI testing in the limit is difficult). Also, if anything, the last couple of years have shown that front end development, and web dev in particular, is highly prone to churn. Hence managers might be tempted to think of a front end as a throw-away component that needs to be redone anyway a couple years down the road when no web dev wants to touch legacy code not using the latest and greatest tech stack, and the relative difficulty of UI testing adds to that. Now why there's so much churn in web dev is another question. One hypothesis is that it's a field seeing lots of freshman; as such, the wealth of frameworks we're seeing is left as a trail of those younger devs learning to make sense of webdev ;) But maybe it's simply that requirements and expectations are changing all the time. Personally, I'm not at all of the opinion that frontend coding is or should be less valuable than backend.