[inopinatus]

"The thing that backend devs don't realize is that frontend is not easy." - I think that's a false dichotomy, one that describes no professional programmer I have ever encountered except the most junior, or the most foolish of hopefully-soon-to-be-ex colleagues. In my experience it is product managers, architects with a mostly-infrastructure background, and nontechnical stakeholders, who tend to assume that frontend is easy. All developers who prefer to work in the backend will have built a user interface at some time, and learned that programmatically fulfilling human needs and intentions is a tough ask.

"ReactJS ... is becoming the _de facto standard_ ... and this is good" - strong disagree, standards that aren't standards that are controlled by a proprietary actor have rarely been a good thing. The woes of dealing with Microsoft Office file formats, or Adobe Flash, or Google Reader pay testament. Heck, QWERTY keyboards. Or Edison's AC/DC feud with Westinghouse, a struggle over proprietary preferences that can be directly blamed for the extended length of my tea breaks when visiting the US.

I feel like there's something missing from core ES, something conceptual that would encourage an ecosystem to develop that isn't framework-specific. We just don't know what that is, yet.