A lot of it is that UI programming is just difficult and inherently complex. Expectations of users are very high and always shifting. Browsers/consumer OSes ar

A lot of it is that UI programming is just difficult and inherently complex. Expectations of users are very high and always shifting. Browsers/consumer OSes are constantly moving targets. Mistakes and bugs, even small ones, stand out in a glaring way, so there’s low forgiveness. There are more code paths and they’re harder to test. All that means that unless you want to miss your deadline by a year or leave a bad impression on users, you will need a lot of libraries! Backend/systems specialists always underestimate how hard UI programming is. Then they try their hand at frontend and quickly run into a wall. They find they either need to build something clunky that users aren’t impressed by or else spend a lot of time learning new tools and paradigms (and yes, installing lots of dependencies /shiver). This is a blow to the ego, so it’s better to criticize the language, the culture, the “churn”... anything to avoid admitting the pixel pushers are solving seriously tough problems too :)