I'm not insanely deep into frontend, I mostly just pick up React and call it a day, but it seems like this is also over-engineered?

I've seen vanilla JS before, and I just know I wouldn't want to do the housekeeping that comes with it. People claim it's less work because it' simpler, but I fully expect myself to rewrite the thing at least twice, only to give up because I have no actual mental model anymore of how it works.

I have never in my career encountered a Vanilla JS project of at least medium size that I would have called simple. They all feature brittle selfmade frameworks whose developers have since left the company years ago.

I write C++ and C# all day - I think it’s fair to say the same about a project in any programming language!

This is my understanding too - tools like react are like microservices - they’re a technical solution to an organisational problem. HTML/css/JavaScript is an imperfect abstraction, so we got bootstrap. Then we got client side frameworks which introduced a build step, and then we got asset bundles, optimisers, linters, validators, tree shakers, package managers, validators for your package managers. All of these monkey patched around the actual problem with more abstractions, and the end result is what we have now.

Isn't the main problem that the building blocks the modern web is based on are not a good fit for what we do with it?

CSS is a total mess. HTML is a mess. JS is okay, but is not a high quality language.

We would save so much time and money if we would have a modern base to build on. Sadly this will probably never happen, because company interests will try to corrupt the process and therefore destroy it.

How are CSS and HTML a mess? Combined, they're an incredibly powerful layout engine that works almost the same across all environments and devices while also featuring easy accessibility.

When taking a bird eyes view on CSS it will be hard to oversee that CSS is a mixture of different concepts that evolved over time with a lot of inconsistentsies. It is possible to make it work, but it's not pretty.

Same for HTML. If the web would be reimagined today, there is a very low chance that we would create HTML as is.

the biggest problem with html/css is that they are tightly coupled. you can't meaningfully modify a layout with css alone.

second biggest problem is "no stricter mode". so even wrong or useless html/css code goes unflagged and is treated as it is normal.

CSS is way too powerful.

> you can’t meaningfully modify a layout with css alone Wut?

> you can't meaningfully modify a layout with css alone.

https://csszengarden.com/pages/alldesigns/

That statement wasn't true ages ago, and it's even less true now.

Like using SPAs for classical Web development, and then they rediscover PHP.

It’s mind blowing when you check the generated code, because it goes over 50 elements deep for a simple looking website.

Makes me think that there’s no way this is computationally efficient either.

That particular issue is nothing to do with Next or React and everything to do with how HTML/CSS is a really shitty layout engine.

Hard disagree. This is JavaScript frameworks building a hierarchy for themselves and ignoring any sort of complexity on the generated DOM. There’s 0 reason for these 8-10 nested divs other than that’s what the framework spits out.

Same reason why 90% of websites have serious UX issues and constant bugs. This and ad frameworks.

And underenginered at the same time !

Not that backend is any better - microservices everywhere, must scale to Facebook traffic even if we only have 10 customers, etc. Saying this as a backend dev