[davnicwil]

> Visually, most web pages haven't changed much, and web development has become much harder.

Both true, yet engineers keep switching to newer frameworks and libraries anyway, rather than sticking with what they have and just building stuff.

The question then becomes, assuming they are rational, why?

I'll propose at least one major reason: efficiency. What's improving isn't what is possible to build with these technologies, but how effectively those things can be built, to a reasonable degree of reliability, in the same amount of time, even accounting for the greater difficulty in learning and using the technologies.

That's where progress is being made here. Not in the what but in the how easily, how quickly, how well. You could do anything you can do in React (say) with vanilla JS, imperatively updating the DOM with cumbersome APIs etc. The question is how much longer would it take / what more could you have built in that time using React.