Yeah I feel like every day there's an article on HN about how we're moving back to the old days without client-side frameworks. Except that's not true at all. People are still writing in React/Vue/Svelte, but now there's tooling that allows it to run on the server as well (SSR). Client-side frameworks are playing a bigger role than ever before. And there was no gas-lighting in the 2010's, SPAs are still here and many still use <div id=root>, even with SSR.

We are seeing a bit of reduction in client-side bloat due to bundlers and compilers like Webpack or Svelte, but the value of client-side frameworks was never to add bloat to the client anyways. It was always about making it easier to write complex user features. So they provided things like better composability, better state management, etc. So when tools come along that provide the same benefits, while reducing client-side bloat, then of course the industry starts moving.

I think there's also a slight sampling bias in HN because 90% of the posts here are articles and blog posts, both of which can be written in static html. So of course there's going to be blogs boasting about how they got away without a javascript framework. But the majority of internet users aren't browsing blogs, they're spending time on big web apps like Facebook and Youtube. And those web apps benefit greatly from these frameworks.

Yep. It's very convient to pretend that we jumped from Apache template-includes to React, but there was a messy time in between where client-side rendering with jQuery was extremely popular.