Having been through half a dozen programming languages and most phases of the evolution of web development, I have a very different perspective. The complexity and fragility of modern JS-centric web development would have been unimaginable to us 15 years ago.
What started (as far as most people experienced) as Jquery, where you could sprinkle a little JS and make some big UX improvements ballooned into this monster where you need thousands of libraries, package management, bundling/minifying/babeling/etc., and fallback plans (you do have graceful degredation built into your JS frontend, yes?).
As the phrase goes, we can't see the forest for the trees. If we did carefully review the path we took from then to now, the promises or beliefs we bought which led us down certain trails, and then considered the outcome... I expect we wouldn't be even close to this situation we find ourselves in now.
I prefer the modern mess.
It’s still a mess, though.
I don't want to paint with too broad of a brush. Some of my best friends are frontend developers! But a community can have a certain "atmosphere" or "vibe" to it. I do a lot of Go programming these days, and I find the "vibe" in Go is one of self-righteous arrogant twattery. Does that mean every Go developer is like that? Of course not. But I found that's the overall "vibe" in the community nonetheless (it's a bit better than it used to be though).