I personally love the front end frameworks, and I don’t find them frustrating at all. Knockout was a workhorse until angular came along. And then vuejs. And now I use sveltekit for pretty much any web app.

The frameworks are popular because you can build things incredibly quickly once you know the ins and outs of your framework of choice. The component-style design, the endpoint design, so much is just driven by the needs of web-based development and the framework creator’s preferred way of abstracting away some of the challenges.

Flutter, Jetpack Compose, and SwiftUI all have React-like components.

The browser was intended to render documents, not applications.

In particular, HTML has a tree structure, which means that things that are semantically related on the page and update together are often miles away from each other in the tree.

And the page in the browser is part HTML, part CSS, part Javascript. Frameworks try to let the developer work in JS only and generate the rest.

And finally, much of the application's state is often kept in a backend, and access to it a asynchronous.

I think that's why Web development is so distinct from other UIs.

One reason is probably that creating UIs programmatically was historically very cumbersome in JavaScript due to various issues that are no longer relevant. That means everything had to be HTML-based hybrids of some sort.

Because there are a lot many js devs than others. Hence js ecosystem is significantly larger.