There are two forms of "the web" There is the document web - in which HTML/CSS/JS is more than sufficient. Somewhere between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 we started ex

There are two forms of "the web" There is the document web - in which HTML/CSS/JS is more than sufficient. Somewhere between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 we started experimenting with delivering application experiences to a web browser - arguably an abuse of the document web. This is the application web and it is a distinct use case. HTML, CSS, and JS on their own provide a pretty poor application development experience. At the very least, building a full application in HTML/CSS/JS is non-trivial. Rewind 10 years and many of the tools we take for granted on the backend were missing from web development, notably composability and dependency management. Scaling UI work up to teams of dozens of engineers is difficult. Companies with multiple UIs have a hard time re-using code between those UIs. Tools like React, Storybook, npm, and Webpack are addressing that gap. If you don't use them, given sufficient time and growth, you'll end up with your own patterns trying to address similar gaps in your code base. Arguably the industry took a pretty windy and awkward path to "on-demand sandboxed applications delivered over the wire," but that's just what happens with incremental development I guess. We started with a web browser and the document web, abused it to deliver some interactive applications, found it was "good enough," and then pushed it as far as it could go. We ended up at a local optimum. There are likely other optimums out there.