Fwiw, I think a lot of that is familiarity. I'm trying to create a Python backend right now, and it's something I've done before, but still every time it feels like a pain - what are the best practices for dependencies now and how do I install everything, how do I set up a server, how do I get it to work with SSL/TLS, where should I be putting my assets and my templates, how do I get them to link together, how do I get this into a container, etc, etc.

But I think that's just a familiarity thing. I know what I'm doing when it comes to frontend development, so it's not an issue to get a new project off the ground, but backend development - and particularly backend development in Python - is something that I only touch occasionally, and therefore have to futz around with every time.

I would agree partially. My python experience wasn't even as actual web applications until 3-4 weeks ago and mostly used python for scripting and such. But sure, this means that I know things like dependency management, deployment and similar topics around the language.

But this is also where I'd disagree partially: The backend world moves a lot slower and feels a lot more settled to me. Sure, I'm relying on experiences as a sysadmin and a python developer, but: (i) If you need a VPS, you still have the 4-5 choices you had for years, Hetzner (Cloud by now), Digital Ocean, Linode, AWS Free Tier. (ii) SSL-Fronting had the same answer for I think 10 - 15 years by now. Front it with an Apache or Nginx proxy with Lets Encrypt. LE was the biggest change there. (iii) The ancient good old python3 -m venv + activate + pip is still very much valid and recommended. I'm currently trying out poetry, but even that uses venvs and pip in the background. (iv) And then assets, templates, and even production deployment guidelines are mentioned e.g. in the wonderful quickstart of Flask [1]. And there are several really solid and stable development tools around there for linting, formatting, typecheckind. VSCode for example recommends them quickly.

Most of this has been stable for years while being carefully improved. On a similar page, I haven't been working as an active java developer in like 6 years. I can still readily understand pretty much all java builds in the company because the tooling is just stable.

The 2-3 tries I had to get into the JS ecosystem meant I had to reset most of my knowledge because all of the frameworks, toolings had been deprecated, replaced, rewritten and anything else.

1: https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/2.3.x/quickstart/

I'm not sure the backend world moves all that more slowly, it's just if you're in it, you know which new parts to accept, and which to ignore. To take Python as an example, my impression as a newcomer is that Flask is pretty outdated at this point — why not use async/await and FastAPI instead? And are you sure you should be using pip/venv/requirements.txt still? Poetry and PDM both have lockfiles — surely that's better?* And yes, there's lots of recommendations for linting and formatting, but which should I actually be using? Is Black best? Or Yapf? Ruff seems to be the new hotness, is that the recommendation now?

I'm sure the answers to you are fairly obvious (and in fairness, a lot of them are fairly obvious to me), but that's often the same feeling I get when people ask similar questions about the frontend ecosystem. Like, if you're not worried about doing anything complicated, pretty much all the libraries that I use on a daily basis also provide a `.min.js` download on the GitHub page, and you can just pack those into a folder and get started writing your code. If you need a bundler, just install NodeJS, and then run `npx vite` in a folder with some HTML files in it, and you'll be up and running in no time.

* My point here is to be sarcastic, but this is one of those things that genuinely surprises me about the Python ecosystem every time I have to interact with it: the default way of installing dependencies is completely insufficient for creating at least halfway consistent builds, and every alternative seems only designed to deal with the happy path.

All of them have little command line programs. You have to run specific commands, in a specific order. Each one does... things. Many things, grabbing stuff from all over the Internet. You have no idea what any of these other things are, but there sure are a lot of them. Do you need them? Dunno, guess so, but where do they come from? Your directory tree starts growing many leaves and branches. But wait, you made a small change, you have to run something else to make it pick up the change and re-something the whozit or your application throws inscrutable errors. You start to despair, so you begin reading documentation. All of the documentation is cheery and bright, telling you how wonderful this or that package or tool is, so now you feel like a moron because you simply don't understand what's happening.

You give up and become a pea farmer.