[dkarl]

I agree. The importance of separating presentation concerns from business logic was in the air, impossible to avoid, when I became a software engineer in the early 2000s.

> At that point [in 2016], the idea of fundamentally decoupling the front-end web layer from the back-end business logic layer was only an early trend, and not yet a named architectural approach.

The first named architectural approach I ever learned was three-tier application architecture (presentation, business logic, database,) named to contrast it to the two-tier approach of combining the presentation logic and the business logic in a single layer (often a desktop application that communicated directly with a database.) The problems arising from this mixing and the advantages of separating UI and business logic into different architectural tiers were well known to people writing internal business applications long before web applications took over this niche. I don't know the history prior to my own introduction to the industry, but I wouldn't be surprised if it dated back to the mid-1990s or even earlier.