The state of the art in the browser was jQuery and ES5. CoffeeScript was mature and stable. The Express framework and Node.js 0.8 were perfect for server-side JavaScript.
It was blazing fast, unopinionated, and minimal. It's too bad it didn't last.
Recently I had a discussion on here about React vs PHP. The conclusion seemed to be that PHP died for no reason and on second thought it’s more popular now than it’s ever been. That might be a mainstream opinion today but five years ago? How dare you speak against the React/Node hegemony.
Hopefully people come around to the idea that newer is not always better and older tech is sometimes only considered outdated because the trendy blogs don’t talk about those languages/frameworks anymore. JavaScript everywhere isn’t the answer and server side languages/frameworks are often better.
Phoenix LiveView might not win but it’s certainly going to define what the web looks like over the next few years.
The changes are not being driven by any need for a new language or framework, just the hype cycle of technology. And when your business depends on that hype cycle, it is in your best interest to keep that spinning as fast as possible. No collusion or conspiracy needed.
Typescript and react are a joy to work with. I miss them every day I do only python, which has been my bread and butter for 16 years.
The framework landscape for SSR is not as good but it's getting there definitely. Nextjs is promising nowadays.
I have the opposite feeling. 2010ish was when companies really started leaning in to building desktop experiences on the web and 2012/2013 was when it was clear the tools were coming up short. I don't know about you but I don't look back on Backbone fondly. It's not a coincidence that React, Vue, and Angular2 all came out around 2013/2014.