Everyone wants a free ride: beautiful modern UI, fast, easy to use, cross platform, free.
If it’s so bad, why is it getting worse?
…because people like free stuff, and no one actually wants either a) a crappier (but better tooled) solution or b) to pay for a better solution.
Its not that no one cares about these hard problems… it’s just that no one actually cares enough to be more than complain about it for free.
It is what it is.
The chances that it will magically resolve itself without a major shift in how developers build things is zero.
The problem isn’t the frameworks.
It’s that people use them.
Windows keeps getting worse and worse. People pay money for it, and yet Microsoft is putting ads in it.
So clearly the problem is not limited to people wanting "free" stuff.
For example, hapi (https://hapi.dev/), a feature comparable web server framework to express, has zero external dependecies.
There are a lot of responsible maintainers of great packages in the node community which keep dependencies to a minimum. It's up to the consumers to use and value them, not just default to the likes of express.
There is esbuild which help eliminate webpack hell, but most shops still use "Create-React-App".
There are some lite weight alternatives to React (like Preact), but most shops aren't using them yet.
I can't really think of anything else that could count as an improvement.