[context: frontend eng here, with a CS background and lots of experience on the backend] The reason frontend dev sucks so much, essentially, is humans. Have y

[context: frontend eng here, with a CS background and lots of experience on the backend] The reason frontend dev sucks so much, essentially, is humans. Have you met humans? They are opinionated, dogmatic, and hidebound; their habits and preferences are arbitrary, and, collectively, comprise their horison the way the bars of a cage do a bird's. A slight user preference for something inconsequential, like, say, a realtime indication of password strength, or an absence of loading delays, means that if your product does not "meet user expectations" for some some incredibly inane value of `$EXPECTATION`, you can reliably expect your competitors to consume not just some, but eventually, all of your sales, and is therefore strongly selected against. Recalling that you are yourself substrated upon a human, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Be honest. Are all of your preferences rational? What even is 'rational', anyway? I'm not just doing a lazy gesture to pseudo-philosophy here, I'm actively asking you to define practical rationality (not just logic, mind you) in a way that has no reference to common practice, intuition, or habit. Good luck :) (Note: I wasted my twenties in a philosophy PhD programme, so I know enough to advise you that this is a honeytrap that you can literally spend decades unsuccessfully trying to answer. I know I did.) Anyway, because of user expectations -- expectations like: bespoke widget sets, branding, performance, speed, similarity with native app, cross-browser compat, etc. -- we -- us engineers -- built elaborate tooling back in the day to accomplish all this, for 2008-ish values of 'back in the day'. Some of these, like jQuery, eventually crystallized into new browser APIs, but a lot of them involved various kinds of either stack lock-in, or conceptual lock-in. (React does both.) Remember how I said humans were creatures of habit? Well, horribly enough, engineers are humans too, and we can't get good (really good) at things until we've put in 10k hours or so. So, if you've put in 10k hours into React, you're going to be at a competitive disadvantage if you move everyone to a saner alternative, such as htmx. This, too, is strongly selected against. So, there you have it. Frontend development is terrible because it's the part that touches the most humans.