I think it's because around 2015 or so there was a lot happening with front end frameworks, and the sentiment comes from then and people have just not updated t

I think it's because around 2015 or so there was a lot happening with front end frameworks, and the sentiment comes from then and people have just not updated their priors since. AngularJS was pretty popular at the time, Angular 2 migration was looming, backbone still existed, jQuery (standalone or paired with both) was going strong, Polymer hit 1.0 and it looked like Web Components might actually be something and useful, React was gaining a lot of popularity, Vue was gaining a small amount of popularity, svelte an even smaller amount, Meteor was somewhat popular and had its own front end library. Of course in addition to all that, traditional server rendered sites were more popular then than now and there were even more options there. However, React quickly became pretty much the default. Not that there's 0 churn there. The "right way" to do React has changed quite a bit in the last decade. And early on before all the libs people liked to glue together somewhat matured/settled it was common to have to replace stuff that just got abandoned. More than once I had to pick up someone's old unmaintained project to do a bug fix only to find I couldn't even get the project to install/run because it was in the pre auto lock file era and nobody ever ran `npm shrinkwrap`