I would love a brief history of GUI programming concepts and patterns if you could point to one.
Fowler has a good overview of GUI architectures: https://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/uiArchs.html#HumbleView - note that this is at this point dated and does not cover the 'reactive' model.
He also recommends this survey: http://aspiringcraftsman.com/2007/08/25/interactive-applicat... (Haven't read it myself.)
Java also used to have a funky toy like thing in the beginning called Bongo (by a company called Marimba). It was a bit of a toy, but I found it an interesting, if flawed, take on scriptable GUIs. This is all I can dig up today: https://people.apache.org/~jim/NewArchitect/webtech/1997/10/... (If anyone here knows where I can download Bongo I'd hugely appreciate it. It was really fun to play with.)
I haven't seen anything about 'design-surface' & 'design-time' in context of Javascript frameworks yet but I have a feeling that will happen in due course. Can't dig up anything that is not .NET specific but it is a generally applicable idea for component based systems. Think GUI builders in visual studio or NetBeans. This is more of interest if you want to create your own framework.
Component models are a huge topic.
In the beginning (NATO, 1968): http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/nato1968.PD...
Hope this is of use to you.
A quick search turned up this list of several tools along that line: https://github.com/xyc/til/tree/master/react/devtools
On the other hand, you get to meet people all over the industry who were asked to deliver a simple Frontend app but built a new trending framework not because they had to solve a nontrivial problem but because they projected too much into the future that they thought that introducing some meta gymnastics will solve a probable UX scenario in the next 2-3 years down the product line!!!
I'm being a bit snide here since the Java community had to endure years of uninformed ridicule regarding the meta gymanstics required for component oriented programming.
I remember talking to a react or backbone (or whatever, it was the current 'thing') developer 1.5 years ago and giving a brief history of GUI toolkit frameworks before browsers. I swear, his eyes lit up like I was spilling occult secrets. Back to the future, par per course in this forgetful field.
[p.s. it's not just the browser side people. Many years ago I mentioned in a Go community group to take a look at the Servlet architecture (circa ~2000) and its minimal but powerful abstractions. I think it was yesterday that we had people cheering "context" in Go 1.8.]