The post How Functional Programming Shaped (and Twisted) Frontend Development from four days ago provides great broader context about the history and concerns. It ends with what this post seems to primarily concern itself with: The alternatives, improvements, innovation, and opportunities we may be missing / should evaluate.

A good companion piece to this article, is the Dead Framework Theory article, which discusses AI coding tools bolstering React's dominance.

I use HTML5, css3 and vanilla js... haven't seen a web dev project in years that actually needed to be an application. for the odd moment where I need interactive controls htmx comes to the rescue. I've built a few actual web applications using both react and angular before and can tell you nothing is more amazing than not having to deal with npm anymore. don't get me started on downloading all backend state into browser cache just to change the color of a button ;-)