I've wondered if going back to that paradigm would be more productive or not than using React et al.
Plenty of big sites like Amazon or Steam still are made this way. Not exactly PHP + jQuery but rendering HTML on the server and sprinkling some JS on top of it.
Has anyone gone back to working like that?
Working with react has a higher barrier of entry (something which is becoming less true over time given that many templates etc exist for it), but if you want to be producing pages and functionality, a good react dev will run leagues around even an a exceptionally good jquery dev.
I’m solid at both and we are talking a dev cycle that is magnitudes faster once you are set up reasonably well. There’s a reason it’s popular. Typescript makes a lot of testing unnecessary and gives many guarantees on robustness. React makes it a breeze to create complex state full components. Nextjs makes it super easy to deploy all this to a web app and quickly create new pages.
The maintenance demands for using a heavy, evolving framework and a large graph of churning dependencies are tremendous and perpetual. While you can make meaningful wins on delivery time for a new feature, once "you are set up reasonably well", you've impliclty introduced new costs that don't apply to "vanilla" code that stays closer to established standards and only includes code it actually uses.
That's not to argue that vanilla is strictly better (both have a place), but just to acknowledge a latent but significant tradeoff that your comment seems to ignore.