[cc81]

You can run 10 year old JavaScript as well, no problem. But Java written today is pretty different from Java written 10 years ago and the Java frameworks are very different.

My point is that you can write code in the style from 10 years ago in any stack but for some reason people seem to take pride in it in the JavaScript world just because they cannot be bothered the actually learn modern development. Not to mention they tend to exaggerate the difficulty of getting started. Compare the tooling, build chain and language features of a JavaScript stack with for example Java. It is not like the JavaScript one is more complicated.

You don't need something like React if you are doing a simple web page but a lot of people ARE building more advanced web applications these days and then it is probably best to just suck it up and learn a modern stack because the old ways of development is not really suited for it.