[crystal_revenge]

> Dev jobs where you do no frontend at all are pretty unusual,

Maybe for webdev jobs this is true, but there's lots of software out there in the world that is not web development. I don't think I've ever seen ML engineers anywhere near the front-end except in cases where they're personally interested in it.

I do think if you're doing web development being asked to do a front end task, especially as your first ticket since these tend to be quicker fixes, is not too surprising.

But OP might do best to try to avoid web development work altogether. There are quite a variety of data engineering, ML engineering and infrastructure related roles where it would be completely out of the question to be expected to do any front-end.