I have been writing mostly front end web code for about 25 years. I prefer the Node side because the code is closer to vanilla JS. In my experience almost ever

I have been writing mostly front end web code for about 25 years. I prefer the Node side because the code is closer to vanilla JS. In my experience almost everybody has been mortally terrified of the front end. In the past people had bizarre opinions of what they wish JavaScript should be and would spend the majority of their energy brutally bastardizing the language to look like something it wasn’t. This was very common of Java developers. Even now most front end developers carry a petrifying fear of the DOM. This is why employment looks like what you describe. Do you need giant applications, 100000 line of code, and long build processes to write text to the screen? Most developers will tell you it’s the only way to do it. I am a huge fan of primitive use of TypeScript. It does require Node to execute the compiler, but otherwise applies to the frontend no differently than the backend.