as someone who has made money as front-end developer, & saw the error in my ways. I will say the industry is not interested in simpler things. they're not interested in making the web faster for everyone. your typical insert framework here web app is slow on a laptop and even worse on mobile. now throw in hiring, it means everyone thinks their app should be on react or whatever, when it doesn't warrant it to be. look at Basecamp for apps that work without a major framework. things like htmx exist but community is small.

so yeah, props to the author for making a proposition for something that would work.

but nah, frontend work this days is about making everything complex from getting the project running to the build steps and even deploying the project.

though one area, I will say frontend is now better on is testing: cypress, jest and react-testing library are nice things to work with.