Yeah, I've witnessed the entire arc also as an ex-ex-ex PHP developer from the early 00s, and I literally recall the original justification for this whole exodus that lead to the creation of React and a slew of other things was "jquery bad".
I just wish we had skipped all the in-between stuff and just arrived at htmx back in 2011 instead of now. Maybe I'd still be doing frontend stuff and not burying my head as far into backend as humanly possible while I wait for a workflow that doesn't require a package.json and a 3 GB node_modules folder so I can make the same frontend widget I could make with 50 lines of js in 2007.
I just wish we had skipped all the in-between stuff and just arrived at htmx back in 2011 instead of now. Maybe I'd still be doing frontend stuff and not burying my head as far into backend as humanly possible while I wait for a workflow that doesn't require a package.json and a 3 GB node_modules folder so I can make the same frontend widget I could make with 50 lines of js in 2007.