I worked on a "web app" in the early 2010s, 10k lines of vanilla JS and jQuery, and it was a nightmare. Adding basic features or fixing the many bugs we discov

I worked on a "web app" in the early 2010s, 10k lines of vanilla JS and jQuery, and it was a nightmare. Adding basic features or fixing the many bugs we discovered every day took hours or days. Any refactoring took weeks. We had to invent new abstractions on top of existing abstractions to keep everything more or less understandable and maintainable. Just splitting the code into different files (like to achieve some sort of frontend MVC and avoiding to have 5k lines of code in a single file...) and loading everything in the correct order was a puzzle. Making or changing any kind of edit forms was a real challenge too and prone to just adding new bugs to the list. Between loading all the data in AJAX, adding an id to each input and filling every input one by one with jQuery by copy/pasting their ids from the HTML, generating the selects and selecting the correct option(s) and adding them to the DOM, dealing with all the buggy jQuery modules like date and time pickers and their own ways to initialize and return data, showing or hiding parts of the form depending of the selected options, extracting the new values one by one from the DOM with jQuery once the user submits the form, validating the data and toggling the classes of the inputs to "error" with jQuery and adding error messages at the correct spots inside the DOM, revalidating the data and formatting it and sending it to the backend, refetching the values just to be sure everything is in sync and updating the values inside the DOM again with jQuery by copy/pasting ids and classes from the HTML... We take all this stuff for granted nowadays because the frameworks do it for us but it was so artisanal back then. Eventually I pushed to rewrite the app when Backbone.js came up, and we started using tools like grunt, and it was already a huge step forward. Then some years later we migrated to Angular 1, it was another big win in productivity. Eventually React came out and I started experimenting with it and I thought it was revolutionary. Its component paradigm allows to break the app into small manageable and reusable pieces and this makes everything simpler. And then Microsoft released TypeScript and now we have code safety and autocompletion on everything, including external packages. And we also have JS export/imports, fetch, async/await and so on... And tools to test all the logic and interactivity in our apps. Nowadays frontend development is just so much easier than before. I can't believe that people who think the opposite have actually worked on any sort of real life big frontend projects in an enterprise environment (1 or several teams working on the same codebase, new non-trivial features to implement every day).