[underwater]

The conclusion is a bit spotty, but there are some good points in there.

If you have dedicated backend developers and front-end developers — or worse, separate teams — then each and every change becomes painful. Writing bog standard UI and backend code shouldn't require in-depth specialist knowledge, and you can usually collapse those down into a single role.

I also agree that the frontend requirements should drive the shape of the API. If you have a backend team they tend to picture an idealized consumer of their API. They stress over whether the API follows RESTful principles and how to model things out correctly, and version breaking changes so their consumers can have their own update cycle. But when you step back and realise that the API has one, or maybe two, consumers. And it turns out writing some weird, esoteric, heavily coupled endpoint for a specific use case is not so horrible.