You're right, it's far far worse now.

Citation needed? I've been using React for 5 years and don't foresee not using it any time soon.

Even if it's still true, "churn" translates to progress. It would be hard to argue complex web application UI development isn't better off now than it was 10 years ago.

> Citation needed?

I don't have a citation, but a colleague of mine who's working on front-end projects repeatedly complains that today's JS stacks require half a dozen base JS packages, which in turn download dozens if not hundreds of ancillary packages, not to mention requiring a couple of transpilers and a bunch of tooling.

And for what? Well, just to be able to render some text and a couple of buttons.

Nowadays we have whole server projects that take less than 50MB of source code and dependencies to build, while a miserable SPA with a login screen and a couple of menus and buttons requires nearly 400MB of JS.

That's pretty bleak.

Serious question: why do you care about 400MB vs 50MB of dev dependencies? Is your internet connection slow? Are you running out of hard drive space?

There are projects like create-react-app and Parcel which offer very reasonable zero-configuration toolchains.

If you care a lot about runtime dependency weight, there are lightweight libraries like Preact (3kB).

I know. Things were so much nicer 5 years ago just before React, and the other myriad frameworks we have now, came out.

Out of curiosity, which frameworks/libraries are you referring to, and why do you think they are nicer than the "UI as a function of state" style libraries like React?