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It could simply be that front-end web development is predominantly done by a new, younger generation of programmers, many of whom perhaps didn't come from programming backgrounds but rather a design background. This generation is only just starting to learn important lessons that the wider programming community learned decades ago about maintainability, portability, the pros and cons of standardisation and of rapid prototyping/evolutionary development, how to design systems of non-trivial scale that can remain useful for extended periods, how to balance the overheads of introducing external dependencies with the benefits of using ready-made, tried-and-tested code and tools, and many other similar issues. Consequently, that new generation is also only just learning how limited and unfit for modern purposes a lot of the foundations of front-end web development really are. As a direct result, we're now seeing a vast wave of tools, plug-ins, libraries and frameworks designed to paper over the cracks that should never have been there. And because there is little co-ordination or standardisation in the industry, there is also unfortunately a huge amount of wasted work, both for developers of those tools and libraries who are doing the same things repeatedly for no great benefit, and for the potential users who have permanent analysis paralysis. That much will improve as the industry matures and consolidates, though I fear we are now stuck with HTML/CSS/JS as our foundation, at least until the successor to the Web comes along with things like interactive sites and security-by-default as primary design goals. |