How people don't get bored of this same exact thread in every single one of these posts is beyond me.
But also as someone who does fullstack in a pretty much even 50/50 split, this is such a tired meme by this point seemingly from people who just refuse to actually sit down and think about the FE ecosystem for longer than 3 seconds and end up parroting this same talking point.
You could make a similarly dramatic post about the backend world. There you're even fighting which programming language you want to pick. PHP, Ruby, Go, Elixir/Erlang, C#? What about the recent mess with ElasticSearch and Redis? Where and how do you host your backend? Which DB do you use and why? Mongo, anyone?
At this point in the FE framework world, you've got 3 very stable players that have been there for a decade. Angular, React and Vue. And sure, they've each gone through some sort of reworks in the past, but nobody's forcing you to pin your dependencies `@latest`, you can pretty much always keep trucking along with whatever version you were on. We've got a huge app still running along on Vue 2 (not even 2.7 which backports the very nice Composition API) and we see no reason to bump versions to 3. I've even had some nightmare scenarios trying to update Rails and Laravel in the past that dwarf any problems I ever encountered in the frontend world.
Also, vanilla JS, HTML and CSS still exist and work just fine if you're building some small toy thing, but you'll quickly realize why these frameworks exist in the first place (or you'll do the dumb thing of building your own as some do) if you're doing anything more complex than a brochure website.
And the tooling has only gotten simpler if anything with Vite. Want to start a new frontend project? It's literally just `npm create vite@latest`, and you get a nice TUI with which you get to fully customize what you want and don't want. The README even comes with a nice little list of commands for you to run, and hosting can be done literally anywhere where you can deploy the `dist/` folder to, just like the "good" old days.
For people who always claim superiority for being the genius backenders they are, they sure seem to be having a lot of trouble with something that they will themselves say any coding monkey coming out of a bootcamp can do with relatively few problems.
There's a joke I've told many times in interviews if they ask me to define what a full-stack engineer is, to which I joke "It means I do whatever the senior engineer doesn't want to do, which 99% of the time is front-end". The people I tell it to laugh, because it's funny but also because it's true.
On the front-end you're dealing with more customer/users and it's inherently more of a servile role, while it's much easier to be stubborn, eccentric, 'powerful' in the tech-facing backend.
I'd also wager there's a certain "tech purity" angle too, given the inherent reverence foisted upon lower level languages and programming fields that is seemingly rife.
To play devil's advocate on myself, perhaps it's more that the higher end technical complexity challenges for Front-End aren't commonplace enough. I've had the fortune to work in a field where the level of necessary technical complexity on the front-end part of my job is very high, so ymmv
For real. React or superObscureFrameworkSixPeopleUseFrom2009? The churn is endless!
In the Java world alone: Spring vs EE vs Play vs Quarkas vs Micronaut vs Helidon... Tomcat vs Jetty vs Netty... Jar vs War vs Ear ... Maven vs Gradle vs Ant...
But also as someone who does fullstack in a pretty much even 50/50 split, this is such a tired meme by this point seemingly from people who just refuse to actually sit down and think about the FE ecosystem for longer than 3 seconds and end up parroting this same talking point.
You could make a similarly dramatic post about the backend world. There you're even fighting which programming language you want to pick. PHP, Ruby, Go, Elixir/Erlang, C#? What about the recent mess with ElasticSearch and Redis? Where and how do you host your backend? Which DB do you use and why? Mongo, anyone?
At this point in the FE framework world, you've got 3 very stable players that have been there for a decade. Angular, React and Vue. And sure, they've each gone through some sort of reworks in the past, but nobody's forcing you to pin your dependencies `@latest`, you can pretty much always keep trucking along with whatever version you were on. We've got a huge app still running along on Vue 2 (not even 2.7 which backports the very nice Composition API) and we see no reason to bump versions to 3. I've even had some nightmare scenarios trying to update Rails and Laravel in the past that dwarf any problems I ever encountered in the frontend world.
Also, vanilla JS, HTML and CSS still exist and work just fine if you're building some small toy thing, but you'll quickly realize why these frameworks exist in the first place (or you'll do the dumb thing of building your own as some do) if you're doing anything more complex than a brochure website.
And the tooling has only gotten simpler if anything with Vite. Want to start a new frontend project? It's literally just `npm create vite@latest`, and you get a nice TUI with which you get to fully customize what you want and don't want. The README even comes with a nice little list of commands for you to run, and hosting can be done literally anywhere where you can deploy the `dist/` folder to, just like the "good" old days.
For people who always claim superiority for being the genius backenders they are, they sure seem to be having a lot of trouble with something that they will themselves say any coding monkey coming out of a bootcamp can do with relatively few problems.