[dragonwriter]

> At the end of the day, web backends are just a lot more varied and complex than web frontends.

> No, they aren't. On the technical side, a web frontend is always just bundles of JS, HTML, CSS, that have to be transmitted to the client.

First, that's factually untrue; web front-ends can contain a wide array of things beyond those three (WASM, content in formats other than HTML that is read and used by the JS/WASM, etc.)

Second, on a similar level of reductionism, web backends are just bundles of bytes that need to be deployed on servers.

[jkaplan]

Even completely leaving aside the language/software diversity, the point is that the vast majority of web "frontends" are really just one thing (rendering the UI and responding to inputs) whereas web "backends" are frequently not really one thing (1 or more types of storage, 1 or more types of computation, responding to requests, perhaps event processing and scheduling, etc.)

I did not mean to imply that all, or even most backends are more complex than frontends -- only that the problem space of backends is larger and more varied (for typical web use these days, at least.)