I even hear Laravel is pretty nice to use.
I'll never know that stuff though because the PHP I generally encounter is 15 years old spaghetti.
I switch between a fair variety frontend, backend myself and have never had that reaction.
It's always, I could do exactly this in 2005 using jquery + JSP, it would not need any of these 1500 dependencies and the user would see absolutely no difference (except downloading 10 times more js today at 5G speeds)
The scalability issues non-facebook scale webapps are trying to solve for do not exist. These apps will be dead before they reach a 10% of that scale and yet the project folks just don't get it.
anecdotally, github project bookmarks I have 3-4 years ago won't even compile today. a large chunk of projects from 2010 still work. Including mine I wrote a decade ago as a newbie js junkie.
Why ? Dependencies.
How much of that is just a garden variety "grass is always greener on the other side" effect?
> the important thing is to do the thing thoughtfully.
And finish! Total losses are still total losses no matter how thoughtfully done.
In my example not so much. I'm working in a number of frameworks, use them regularly, sometimes ColdFusion is just faster / better suited, sometimes some other system.
It's amusing that for a long time the response was "oh man that sounds terrible".
Now it is "oh hey that's server side rendered ... is it a new framework?".
The cycle continues. I end up writing all sorts of things and there are times when I'm working on one and think "this would be better as Y" and then on Y "oh man this should be Z". There are days where I just opt for using old ColdFusion... it is faster for somethings.
Really though there's so many advantages to different approaches, the important thing is to do the thing thoughtfully.