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.