Is there any front end framework that doesn't do this? I dropped out of the front end years ago, and it seems to just get worse every year with a profusion of confusion. Doesn't anyone yearn for back when we didn't have to build the front end at all?? Just emit some HTML and serve up some JS files from the backend, and everything just flows from there?

Someone go make an AI rewrite of Apache+Mod-PHP and sell it to zoomers as the hip new thing already please

> Is there any front end framework that doesn't do this?

React, if you are judicious about what additional packages you use on top of it.

> I dropped out of the front end years ago, and it seems to just get worse every year with a profusion of confusion.

This has actually gotten somewhat better in recent years starting with esbuild which made it possible to use a simple single-binary tool for bundling.

I know everyone loves to hate Angular but it is in a really good place at the moment. If you don't need SSR and just want to build an SPA, Angular is the way to go imho.

What do you use?!

Is there any reason to keep upgrading if the apps keep doing their jobs perfectly fine? Pull in a stable version of the framework and the associated docs and stay there.

For example: https://nextjs.org/blog/CVE-2025-66478

Security.

I'm moderately hopeful that LLMs will help here because they lack the human motivations to needlessly mess around with stuff and over-complicate things.

Sounds like Tapestry. Had a friend who loved it but he stopped talking about it after the 4th major architecture shift.