It's insane that the total complexity of the ecosystem has only grown in the past decade, despite the amount of time and tools trying to contain it. I have a hard time seeing that expectations rose accordingly alongside this. I'm half-convinced it is tolerated as a collective subconscious gatekeeping/total employment mechanism.

My response has been to avoid SPAs as much as possible. YAGNI! Just use boring forms and server responses. Some component libraries can be server-rendered, minimizing the JS payload while giving you some primitives to build off of. Components are a really nice abstraction even in a pure server context. You can contain the goopy Tailwind code a bit.

It's not all bad. Astro seems pretty nice so far!