I don’t make sites like gov.uk or any random-user facing sites, but they are fast, frustrationless and “frontend”. I use them myself. Coming from desktop UIs (from most of them, and they are like 100x superior), writing 1.0 websites is a sort of bdsm to me. I actually avoided web programming before 2.0 became a thing.

I’m sure, and it will be hard to convince me otherwise, that it’s NOT a client model (thin client, thick client, mixed approaches) that is a source of your frustrations, but the amount of bullshit that “frontend developers” tend to serve to everyone including themselves and at the same time leave ends loose by e.g. never checking for errors or assuming incorrect lifetimes or phases of page loading.

If you just write a regular non-wEbApp app with js as a scripting lang and dom as a poor man’s ui lib, it works like any other ui app. All problems arise from trying to jump over the head to render empty frames 200ms faster out of total 12 seconds of loading.

My “stack” is mithril.js, bootstrap.css and just js runtime for “state”, for those curious. Yes, I manage “state” by storing it in js objects and transform it via assignment operators (shocking I know).