2006 is maybe not the correct year, but I'd say the was a period around JQuery's heyday that had a lot of advantages compared to today. JavaScript, while used frequently, was mostly for progressive enhancement, CSS was beggining to be a saner language to work with (particularly with sass), and overall, I generally felt more productive than I do today in the JS-driven world of the web.

Absolutely there's a class of applications that wouldn't be possible with this approach, and I'm glad they exist. But it seems the "correct" answer to any problem to be solved on the web, no matter how straightforward, is to reach for React or a similar framework.