My opinion happens to differ. Textual content is incredibly rich and is likely a target for all content in the future. Consider, we are literally training models to accurately caption things today.

Why? Because language is a hell of an abstraction. More, it is approachable and can often be bounded. Consider, I am not even remotely skilled in art. However, I can adequately describe, for me, a picture by saying who is in it and the event. Try doing the same without language. Often "quaint and uninspiring textual" language.

Do I opine for the what we had in the 90s? Not necessarily. But I do grow weary of folks reinventing frameworks that merely further complicate the very abstractions that they created and now require these frameworks.

> Sure, it's bewildering right now, but in the future, this will all be knit together in a cohesive way.

Could have said those same words literally a decade ago when we were all struggling to figure out all this Rails and MVC stuff and how automated ORMs worked above MySQL. Seven or eight paradigm shifts later, we're all still confused and I see no cohesive knitting.

Do you want to bet on that last one?

Sure, but in the meantime the web is a much less accessible place for screen readers, underpowered mobile devices, and those without good internet connections

> Sure, it's bewildering right now, but in the future, this will all be knit together in a cohesive way.

You'll get over that optimism when 20 years passes and it's a worse mess than it is now; that's what going to happen.

The fact is that 99% of what's done on the web is (mainly textual) document management/display. Facebook (the website responsible for React!) is 99% document display.

The truth is that "rich experiences" are mostly made by enhancing the basic experience of reading rich documents. If you want an inspiring vision of a document-centered future, look at IndieWeb.org. And/or roca-style.org. It's a vision of how the web can be knit together into a cohesive whole based on URLs, rather than segmented into a bunch of unaddressable silos.

About self-hosted app architectures, Cloudron is really good in terms of stability. Just got a newsletter from them that they are hitting 1.0 soon.

You could say the same thing about flying cars. A car with four wheels is a pretty quaint and uninspiring vision, IMO. However it happens to be infinitely more practical.

It was was has worked for almost 5 thousand years, so I am going to go ahead and say it is not quaint, its not uninspiring, and when you say "in the future it will all be knit together in a cohesive way" I laugh heartily. It never has been, and it wont be.