For example the mentioned Go has a HTML templating package in the std library.
You could use something like htmx (the creator is a regular on here) which is a very small, very convenient library that gets you 80% of the way for your typical web application.
For the rest, you can always just stick with plain old DOM manipulation or write web components if you want something that's more re-usable and general. No build step or transpilation shenanigans required here.
I've made a career writing Django apps. In most cases, the JS I write is limited to vanilla JS with no JS dependencies (the minification is done by a Python library which might depend on JS, but it's abstracted away enough that I don't have to know). There needs to be a serious amount of justification to even install Node/NPM as part of a project.
The vast majority of work is done on the backend, with JS only being used for UX. I used to pull in React+ReactDOM on some projects, but Web components are paving the way for that to no longer be necessary.
I rely on the TS compiler to bundle into a single JS file, so I avoid bundler (etc).
I build a simple framework that meets my needs that I can essentially vendor and keep in my head. I'm would love to use an established framework rather then my own (don't get me wrong, there are serious downsides to rolling my own), but it must be small enough I can read it easily in a single sitting. I will not touch the NPM ecosystem. I sometimes will pull a dependency in by manually copying in the parts I need (preserving licenses, etc).
There are real downsides to doing what I do, but I do it to keep myself sane. I do not touch the npm ecosystem.
I also review every line of code I pull in from any language (Go, TS, etc). An ecosystem that makes this difficult or impossible is just a non-starter.
This way, the only dragons I have are ones I created and ones I can slay. The more I write my things in functional style and build only exactly what my application needs, the company's "framework" continues to evolve AND our apps continue to work!
No one is going to change any of the "ecosystem" out from under me because there isn't one. Everything is compiled in Vite (automatically and hot reloaded) and I only ship a minified, static, single index.html file with my entire app in it. There are no globals that I didn't make, no functions that are required unless I required them, etc. It's a HUGE timesaver when debugging or adding new things the team requests.
I'm able to continue to write new, cool stuff in both our public-facing web app and in our internal web tool (game dev), both on the same framework.
That's when I started experimenting with Elm, Bucklescript (now ReScript) and Clojurescript. It was a very insightful journey that made me enjoy frontend development again.
Today, Clojurescript is my favorite method of working with frontend code and, as long as I can pick my own tools, that's the one I'm sticking with.
For those suffering of Javascript fatigue, I highly recommend playing around with these alternatives. Try doing a simple, small side project in them. It may reignite your joy for programing and who knows, maybe you can find a job to work full-time with these tools.
IMO JS is really fun to program this way. You program straight to the capabilities of the browser. All of the problems people promised I'd face by avoiding their framework of choice didn't show up after all.
I use vanilla JS & CSS wherever possible, usually in a Go template.
If I have to create a SPA then I use Vue - I've found it's the least complex of the front-end frameworks. I build it using ESBuild from the flat JS files downloaded from the Vue site and stay as far from yarn/npm as possible.
I'm trying to work out how to compile Go to WASM and manipulate the DOM easily from there, but so far it's more complex than just writing JS.
1. Since WASM doesn't yet expose a feature to share GC with the host, the GC functionality with necessarily be bundled with your outputted code, making your WASM size larger than ideal.
2. All calls from WASM have to go through a JS layer in order to interact with the Web APIs anyway, so now you actually have _two_ GCs to run.
3. The developer experience is going to be poor unless you write a shit ton of wrappers for the existing DOM API.
I say the above not to dissuade you, I find WASM an attractive value proposition and use WASM in all sorts of ways in personal projects. Good luck
Everything else is spot on, that's the pain!
If the company is doing anything web related it will have JS people somewhere right? And it might also choose to make everyone full stack (so doing both Go and JS) or making some of the teams hybrid. That's quite common. I don't really see much difference between a company that chooses Go to a company that chooses Node (or Ruby, whatever), they both have their pros and cons and it doesn't tell me that much about the people I'll be working with.
This feeling is absent from React. The eco system feels much more fragile and driven by hype generated by the blog of the day. I simply don't trust things to work as smoothly.
I used Spring Boot at work and I have worked with backend libraries like Express(JS), Flask(Python), Gin(go) all the experiences have been much better than using Spring Boot. Java takes too long to compile, dependecy injection in Spring just seems to take forever, and overall Java is very very verbose. Just to create a stupid API, you have to create a new class for request, one for response, controller, service. I can do it if I am paid for it but using that for side projects, a big NO.
I would like to comment on how you feel Java compilation is slow. Incremental compilation while developing is fast and doesn't affect my productivity (your experience may differ).
Triggering a single threaded full build with one of my services (1000+ files and 80k lines) took less than 30 seconds on my laptop (18s with parallel compilation). But I never do that locally, as incremental compilations are almost instant.
If you need to download dependencies and run tests, the number is higher, but that is not specific for Java
As you point out, the React ecosystem does seem to be mired in "what approach should I take"-style questions for basic things like data loading, routing, etc.
I tried to do side projects with Spring Boot and I also worked with it professionally. I never got to the point where I can focus on just solving problems, I'm always fighting with the framework, looking for how to do certain things in the depths of blogs and stackoverflow because I can never find what I need in Spring docs. I actually find it interesting how some people seem to be very productive with it, while others have issues similar to mine.
I was just skimming and read that, and I thought "he is working in Javascript" and yep, later on that's it.
I stay away from the Javascript/TS ecosystem (npm et al). I program mostly in Go, but also quite a bit in Typescript.
I would learn/use (even if for personal projects) more boring tech stacks, like Java/C#/Go/PL-SQL/T-SQL. For myself, Go has extremely stable tools that just work and have well-known limitations. Consider a lateral move within tech.