Alternatively: it's just teaching whatever is popular in the industry, for better or worse (similarly to how DevOps people would be taught Kubernetes, even if it can be horrible in certain cases and for smaller projects).
Many sites out there don't need JS. Server side rendering would suffice. And many other sites out there would be well served with minimal JS for enriching a few forms.
Yet, that's not the reality that we live in. The reality is that the majority of the developers out there will simply have to deal with lots of JavaScript, TypeScript and frameworks like Vue, React, Angular (i'm using the term "framework" here because they change the entire direction of the development of your front end, not that it matters at all).
So, that's what curriculums will focus on, since clearly people want to have good employment prospects. It doesn't seem like the linked one gets too caught up with the frameworks, though.
But understanding the infrastructure is key here. Understanding the "M" in HTML, understanding the "C" in CSS, understanding http etc.
Team Treehouse is a great resource for learning frontend and backend stuff.
Like every other aspect of programming, there are multiple answers to this.
So I think it's a valid concern
What gets you your first job is you knowing how to use the tools that the companies already use to ship software solutions on the web. If they use react, webpack, graphql, then your best bet at getting your first job is learning enough about those to be productive in a couple of days at the company, and not what happens after you hit enter in the URL bar.
95% of my work as a regular web/mobile dev was about being able to fetch some data, massage it, display it, then handle user interactions to send something back to the server. Some software dev jobs are more complicated than that, but to be honest, most of what we do it not rocket science.
Once you get your first job, you can work "backwards", and learn the basics. This approach also helps you learn what is important as you see it firsthand that it's important. Your team is there to help you learn, you earn money in the process, you make your customers' life easier, and you build your portfolio and gain experience to get your next job (that will hopefully be more challenging than a CRUD app).
I'm not saying that it's great that you learn the tools before the basics, I'm just saying it makes sense if you want to get a job and pay your bills (and set yourself up for long term success as you learn on someone else's dime.
The fundamentals are clearer and more accessible to teach than frameworks. This inspires confidence and I'm pretty sure you won't save any time if you jump ahead and teach React and especially Graphql. You have a _way_ better foundation to learn and use React if you know HTML, CSS, JS, HTTP that I mentioned but also browser dev tools and I would even put git before that. Also people who are already professionals in some field close to web dev will ask fundamental questions, they want to understand things.
Learning framework X is a piece of cake if you at least roughly understand how it works and aren't on completely shaky grounds, and when framework Y comes along you can ask the right questions right away.
The _vast_ majority of web development doesn't use React or Graphql anyway. I don't even know a single dev who knows React and Graphql but cannot make a website without them or doesn't know what DNS is, what common HTTP headers mean or don't know how to center a div.
Some are even amazed that a basic HTML page can be created with a plain text editor.
Such people are "ReactJS" specialists, not even Javascript/Typescript specialists. One cannot easily engage in a conversation on types with them - not that they are negative or close-minded, but such concepts are in the "unknown unknowns" for them.
Nope. Knowing the fundamentals does not take all that very long and can in fact go a long way in enabling someone to pick up newer technology.
Now, this is the opposite of the point that you're making, but i have to admit that it's pretty cool on some morbid level! The fact that we have abstractions that are strong enough for them not to leak and make people dig into the details (e.g. the JS event loop being all that they need to think about).
That's also why tens of millions of people out there can work with spreadsheets of text processing software without knowing what a compiler or interpreter is, or even caring much about the benefits of dynamic linking vs static linking.
Similarly, i can write SQL against a DB without knowing anything about the RUM conjecture or really much about anything apart from the very basics of ACID (at least before Oracle fails to plan queries correctly and needs either statistics to be regenerated or hints added for the optimizer, because it's an evil piece of software).
It just works. I'd argue that it's the way things should be - working on the JVM should absolve one from thinking about compile targets and worrying about things like whether the CPU is from Intel or AMD, or what the ASM format is or whatever. Working in the browser might as well absolve one from worrying about most platform minutea as well, otherwise nothing would get done.
Is is still nice to have a bit of curiosity and explore those things, there being some merit to that, which might as well not be immediately apparent? Sure! Is it required for those people to truly be specialists in their own niche and to be safe from people making fun of their other shortcomings online? Absolutely not!
But many push towards single page apps even if a web site is better suited for the job. If you only have a hammer in your toolbox...
Also, you can have SPAs without Javascript, you can use any language / framework that targets Web Assembly. I enjoy Blazor for SPA.
Use the platform where it makes sense. Extend it with JavaScript where needed. Make it work for everybody and make it better for capable browsers. That is called progressive enhancement. OP did not say that you may never use JavaScript. Just be mindful about it when you do.
Let's start with getting data from the form to your back-end, and once we've got those must-have basics down, then we can start introducing the nice-to-have bits.
How would you create this form without Javascript? Would you require a user to create the assets before the loan?
Saying that HTML provides everything a developer needs to provide an application to client is so ridiculous, I have no idea why this sentiment is so popular. the vitriol expressed for front end devs from the community seems out of place.
Forms work without JS for the most basic baby forms. the moment you go enterprise, more is needed. which is where JS steps in, What am I missing here?
That said - complex forms is a typical example of when you might want to move from a web "page" to an "app".
Do you belive the backend should know about human incorrect input and track state?
What if a cat steps on a keyboard? every addition to a form is a page reload and a query to the server. then the server sends a response. Which is exactly the bloat everyone seems to go on about.
Im sorry but living in a world of enterprise apps, the sentiment that JS is a poor language and a bad choice is both out of place and highly de-coupled from real-world usage.
But sure, application state might not go in the same db/schema as completed transactions.
But there are different levels of state: completed transactions (application finished and submitted), partial business logic transactions (three out of five steps completed) and "app state" (field 6 of form 4 partially filled in etc).
They can all be kept diffently in sync (in sync, because the browser will keep partial state via native widgets if nothing else). Even w3m keeps track of inputs in forms before submission.
As I mentioned, I think complex business flows like these can be a great reason to go from "web page" to "web app" - precisely because it enables rich, ephemeral client state with (some) business rules close to the client.
But that doesn't mean you can't do powerful things with just html/http and some form of continuations etc on the back-end.
If you're employed, working at scale and need to do the complicated stuff, you're not a beginner web developer anymore. At that point, you should already understand the fundamentals and start extending on top of that.
...and this is where it goes off the rails; teaching JS before HTML is how we will continue to have the ridiculous proliferation of app-sites that shouldn't require a single line of JS instead needing the latest version of $browser (you have a choice of browser - pick one ...) to even show any content at all. Forms don't need any JS to work, yet the impression this gives to beginners is that they do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25915313
But then again, this is Microsoft, which is now firmly in bed with Google in contributing to the Big Browser monopoly, so I suppose I shouldn't have expected anything else. The agenda is obvious to anyone who cares to look.