It's an excellent article, and the work within is very well done, but there's a part of me that screams "Why would you introduce this much complexity for what should be a simple scroll?" (overcoming technical hurdles to produce the desired end result aside).
From time to time I dip my toe in and try new things, but as productive as I can get with Astro, the illusion vanishes as soon as I have to understand any of the plumbing.
Fortunately, I can still party like it’s 1999 just fine: just yesterday, I worked on a janky brutalist web app (the same way I did back in 2002, cribbing from the O’Reilly “Dynamic HTML: the Definite Reference”) and “deployed” it with rsync to pico.sh. It’s practically unstyled and I didn’t even use jquery, but it works.
But frontend stuff is messy. How do you tell a person what they're trying to do is wrong and they need to change their inputs? Oh, maybe we can highlight the input or we can pop a modal message. Haha, psyche! Users ignore that shit! Now what you gonna do, buddy?
Frontend is a mess because all you people are a mess.
It reminds me of an online store in the beginning of 2000s
To buy a product, you had to drag&drop the product image over the shopping basket icon. It took me quite a while to figure that out, and I bet they lost a lot of customers.
[Edit: I acknowledge that a PM or manager may have forced the developer to do this, but it's just one example of many]
Sometimes the developers have to take the blame, instead of blaming "stupid" users. Some take that attitude to frameworks as well. If the users complain, they haven't understood how to use it correctly. Just look at the "how to make a todos in 5min" video on YouTube to be convinced of its beauty
Also, backend people can be arrogant as well, but it seems that for some reason new ideas tend to be picked up quicker in frontend, which unfortunately results in bad ideas spreading fast too.
It's only now, in the days of "vibe coding" that I would firmly put the sole blame on developers for bad application interfaces, because it's usually just one clueless person who is YOLOing code out into the wild. Everywhere else: hidden icebergs of complexity and you didn't know what led to the current state.