But it's not complex when you use the right tools. I did PHP professionally for 11 years and I waa bored out my mind of it. The repetition, the boilerplate, the stupid dogma and OO fetishism. And everyone in their freshman year suddenly knew better and tried to preach what they learned in Uni.

"But that's not SOLID and not OOP". But it's simple and does the job.

I moved to Go and AngularJS. That was 2013. I did full backend aka full ssr with Go, and it's a PITA.

I did try htmx with a jinja like template language in Go, with templ and in Rust and ... I forgot the library, it's the go to library in Rust for htmx. All the annoyances are still there.

Session management, service oriented design, if else blocks between and inside html tags. Path parsing and comparison. Template macros. And now also fragments.

Now I use a graphql backend for data, and react consumes it while the ide supports intellisense for queries. It's more simple than writing your queries by hand on the backend. You have interactivity for free. And you let the client worry about how the data is displayed. Also you let the oidc server worry about users.

Concerns are separated. I have authz middleware on the graphql backend, easily written. Everything has layers and there's order and a clean structure. As a plus I don't have to annoy my users with captcha. And I have reduced infrastructure costs as well as traffic.

I'm 50. My internet journey began 1995. I did enough of the old way to hate it and to know when something is better. I have met my share of fanatics, of language and framework Nazis.

You have to stay curious. I have tried htmx multiple times and found it inadequate, not good enough, too limited.

Like I wrote there are no frameworks in any language for it. It's just JS hidden behind html attributes, claiming it isn't JS.

I hate deception, the zealots are deceptive as all zealots in any language, package or framework are. Angular Nazis holy crap. Or React retards where you mention how Vue has simple SSR adaption and Rract doesn't, and are labeled as a React hater.

I'm pragmatic. I like clean structure and efficiency as well as simplicity. Sometimes you have to learn a bit of complexity to have it simple and efficient in the long run. I have tried many things. Ruby on Rails, Elixir. You know what, I have started programming at the age of 11 on the cpc 464 in basic, at 12 I cracked c64 games and wrote cracktros in asm. I'm one of the first cheat creators for MMORPGs ever. I don't consider myself super smart, but I have seen a lot and tried a lot. I also struggle with learning new things. But you have to. Htmx is not the way. It's a step back. It's only for simple things.

I do believe the hype when it's reasonable. Like with MVC. It was the natural way to write SSR websites. This is the way. But then something better came along and it took a while to solve the inadequacies it had. But now it's at a point where SPA + graphql + oidc = awesomeness. And it's going to become better. And I'm not talking about the Nextjs crap, those fake backend libraries that are hugely overcomplicated.