[tonysickpony]

I think yes we are actually over-engineering front-end development at the moment, and I think part of the reason is we are under-engineering on unified standard and toolings in front-end realm. The ever fast progressing in web platform concepts has surpassed the speed of advancements in the platform (mostly browsers) and development environments. Therefore what used to be as simple as an <a href> now could very well be 200 LOC of history state manipulation and observation, what in other programming language is out-of-the box with fresh install or IDE integration is a few hours of webpack config and everyone is different from everyone. In short I think the cause of notorious front-end development is the non-unified status quo. Can't say it is whether a good sign or bad, it may be the price we have to pay to evolve, or maybe we overpaid already.

That has been said. To answer your question, I think if user experience is not high on priority and there isn't much point re-use a lot of UI code, the company is fine with back-end framework and many do. I do believe front-end framework provide many benefits, code re-usability, loose coupling from back-end code, easy for team collaboration, such and such. Company should only switch to them for reasons not the fuzz it generates.