> There's really nothing complex or difficult enough in React, Vue, or any other UI framework that can't be picked up by a competent dev quickly.

Honestly. Where I work we have a few undergrad co-op students who have just finished their first year of school. No previous React experience. They jumped right in and were useful on our React projects after about week. They just read some docs, asked a couple questions and played with our existing code. They're smart people but they're not x10 programmers.

We have other large projects that are a more "traditional" mix of DOM manipulation use jQuery, global CSS, etc. and introducing new hires to that is never as smooth. There are no docs as thorough as React's that explain the patterns established in those codebases (if there are any consistent patterns at all).

One thing to note, we make what I would consider to be web applications (for data management & analysis), not web pages.

I agree with a lot of your points here. For example, I’d love to have a nice constraint system like you can have making an iOS. or even windows app. The problem is we have to work with HTML and the DOM, which aren’t nearly as nice to use out of the box as OS APIs. HTML/CSS/JS wasn’t designed for applications, it was built for basic document manipulation. But the pure accessibility and compatibility of the web is a better trade off for most products because it’s easier for people to find and use something on the web than downloading an app. So we’re forced to use worse tools.

I also don’t get the JS hate here. :) you certainly should not use react for your static resume site or blog. But react is a brilliant and necessary tool for web applications. If you don’t use it, you’ll end up making your own, probably worse abstraction for managing state and reactive updates.

I started the "hating" when pc promised everything would work on every computer. this just seemed impossible bordering idiotic. before this every screen had the same resolution. UI was horrifically easy! The c64 had characters in the font set that allowed drawing boxes. You can imagine but it was 10 times easier.

The problem with many layers of abstraction is that it borders the imposible if the layer abstacted to poorly suports something.

Take physical screen size and simple scaling to fit? Is it a tiny 1024px laptop or a giant tv? there is no solution I can think of