I think this is a variation of Jevon's Paradox. The more power we give to developers - by simplifying, abstracting, optimising - the more they want to achieve,

I think this is a variation of Jevon's Paradox. The more power we give to developers - by simplifying, abstracting, optimising - the more they want to achieve, the faster they want to do it, the less effort they want to spend. Which puts them right back in the position of working under complexity. The reason people are now complaining about React is that React made writing 2015 webapps extremely easy. The result was our appetite and ambition stretched to 2022 webapps and we blame the framework for making things harder, not ourselves.