[MrJohz]

And of course, much the same thing is true for the frontend as well. Most of the time, the worst takes off frontend excess or backend complexity are being told by people who aren't working in field, and just looking in from outside.

Rendering everything on the server and adding a bit of Javascript along the way works - it had its flaws, but so does everything else, you just need to figure out which flaws make sense for you to deal with. For a little extra complexity, use Vite as a bundler, and add a framework - Vue is pretty simple to get started with - and you're almost immediately away. You even get some stuff like Typescript for free at this point.

And like you say, you can make things more complicated with various other tools, but if you need that, you probably know you need that, and you know what it's doing and why it's necessary complexity.

[zelphirkalt]

As soon as you add TS to the mix, you have to deal with TS compiler not being able to output run-ready JS (or has that changed by now?), because of JS issues with modules and you need a "bundler", yet another accidental complexity, and one that is often a nightmare to configure. Then some drive-by person will want you to minify all the things and you add another unnecessary complexity.

TS is great mostly. But it definitely comes at a cost.

[MrJohz]

I think the situation with TS has improved, but yes, I only really use it with a bundler where that isn't an issue - in this case, Vite. But typically Vite does most of the things you'll need out of the box, and I find I rarely need to think about it, so it's the sort of complexity I'm mostly happy to take on.

[throwaway290]

Don't forget that you don't need any bundlers and frameworks if you just want some reactivity, React is very minimal and works in pure JS, just alias createElement to something like el() and off you go

[MrJohz]

I'm not quite sure I'd go as far as calling React minimal, but yeah, there are definitely fairly light options here. Mithril is pretty classic as a "bare minimum framework" option. Vue can be used without any bundling/compilation steps as well, although I think that's less supported these days. I also quite like SolidJS - again, they encourage you to use the compiler, but you can also just use it with template literal strings and it should work just fine.

[herewulf]

I had a problem and got TypeScript for free. Now I solve my many problems with "any" problems.