I have been programming since 2008, but I truly started my professional webdev career in 2014. The company I started at was providing software in a B2B-sector.

I have been programming since 2008, but I truly started my professional webdev career in 2014. The company I started at was providing software in a B2B-sector. Very boring, very non-startupy. They were considered innovators for doing webapps and SaaS in a market where everybody was used to win32 UIs made in Delphi or C++. The tech stack my employer used was Java EE, PostgreSQL, with a frontend in EmberJS. The prevailing view at the time was that we knew how to do applications on the backend with MVC, and that 'if we just figured out how to MVC in a JS-framework, everything would be fine'. Some went with Angular, some with EmberJS. Build steps for frontend were in its infancy, we used Gruntfiles to just concat everything together essentially. When React started to gain traction, everybody scoffed at them. JSX was weird, uni-directional data flow was weird, ES6 classes were weird, too many building steps were weird. But it quickly became clear that this was the way forward. Traditional MVC approaches quickly failed once you got out of the example code and into more complex use cases. Which brings me to my point: React was better IF-AND-ONLY-IF your webapp needed to do more than basic forms. React was never meant for consumer websites. It was never meant to be the default tool for anything on the web. If you wrote a web application, something complex, something with forms, planboards, custom UI, then yeah, it would be a sensible choice. It was meant to solve the problem that doing two-way binding of data is incredibly difficult if you have anything more than some standard form components. The reality of the situation is that innovation in frontend websites (as opposed to webapps) has mostly been standing still, as everybody just switched to using React. CSS has gotten much better, but doing something like a form rendered with PHP + some validation with JS is still a pretty painful experience. HTMX is probably the best attempt I've seen, along with Elixir and the Phoenix LiveViews. Most of the effort seems to go into writing a bunch of libraries for React to solve the complexities of having to deal with a complex set of tools for writing complex webapplications. These abstractions tend to either be complex themselves, or are leaky. I realize my next sentence might as well be 'get off my lawn', but I really hope that devs stop focussing on writing the next state management framework, or routing library, or even rewriting existing things, and just try something to actually move dev forward. Open source a kit of sensible standard components including styling for webapps. Write a simple JS tool for some form validation. Show your barebones NodeJS app rendering HTML and processing forms in an PHP-esque way, give it a logo and a fancy name, chuck it up on GitHub. Don't try and combat complexity with more complexity. We have all the tools we need to write complex webapps. Please make simple websites easier, so people can stop complaining about the complexity of the complex tools meant for complex use cases that they don't need for their simple case.