IMHO, a lot of frameworks just add extra complexity. Now that we're in the twenties, you don't need nearly the level of browser compatability shims like at the turn of the century. Sure, bleeding edge features need that, but most sites don't need any of that. Certainly news and shopping fit well enough with turn of the century browsers, so everything else is fluff (and retargetting, ugh).

It's the same with a lot of server side frameworks; especially PHP frameworks. I've never been able to grasp what a PHP framework can do that PHP can't, other than burn 50ms of cpu before outputting anything.

Any framework you're not familiar with will feel like this. This isn't something unique to frontend frameworks.

But the frameworks get out of fashion faster than you can obtain deep knowledge of them.

However, both front-end and back-end are substantial enough now and have enough frameworks and environments that it's really hard to do well at both. I'd much prefer more specialization, which would hopefully lead to higher quality.

in my circles more and more people look at svelte to try to get away from frameworks altogether.

new tooling is always just around the corner: there is a webpack killer annonced every couple of months.

this very site is full articles "why we switched from/to react", etc.

in the javascript community "stability" is anything with a bit less churn than the bleeding edge. i think it will result in a massive burnout for a whole generation of developers.

Regardless without a framework it ends up with you reinventing core framework features anyway. Yes, a framework driven app is more complex if the page/app is extremely simple. But if it is of any complexity a framework driven app is going to be far easier to maintain and reason about in 99% of situations.

Give me basic templating and server-side rendering and I'm good to go.

That was a time before the web became more standardized as an app platform. Corporations like Microsoft with .NET, Sun with Java, and Adobe with Flash, were all competing take over the whole world of write-once-run-anywhere frontend apps, become the platform of choice, and lock everyone into their way of doing things. Also there was no distinction between desktop computing and mobile computing as mobile computing back then was still underdeveloped.

Now the web is the frontend platform of choice. Ostensibly the platform isn't owned by anyone but the WC3 consortium (which is good), but practically speaking, Google won since everything is WebKit now (which is worrisome). And this has not yet so far solved the problem of the web being built on an incredibly poor programming model that make everyone want to use virtual-DOM frameworks and CSS preprocessors.

Hopefully, web assembly will replace the status quo and let people develop front-end apps using better programming languages and frameworks than just the ones the compile to JavaScript.

Bootstrap + jQuery on the front end, Flask or similar with CherryPy on the backend. SQLite or Postgres if you need it. That will handle 99.9% of websites, it will be cheap and easy to develop and host, and deliver a great experience to the end user.

Why? CSS can do layout with grids and flexboxes just fine, while es6 plus the modern browser api are as ergonomic as jquery. Why pull these dependencies from a decade ago?

I never bothered to learn CSS is why. Bootstrap looks good and consistent with what users expect and requires almost zero effort to use.

Now 1 component will be: server side html, client side html, css and js.

Nice generalization. Tell to that to the thousands of absolutely massive companies running on server-rendered HTML how they need to adopt cutting edge JS.