> I. Can. Not. Fucking. Stand. the front-end work. I don't know why

In my experience, it's a simple matter of it never being done, and people always being unhappy with it. You can anticipate every possible need, streamline the steps needed for the most common and/or important tasks, and spend a gazillion hours making it look pretty-- not only will no one be impressed, but someone will always complain about something. There is never any 'right' way to do it. It's a black hole.

With back end stuff, it's like, does it work without making a mess and not overuse resources? Ok, good job! What are we building next?

I think it's because it has historically been low-status work and stigma about working on the front-end persists. The majority of people I've worked with are eager to throw up their hands and commiserate with others about their lack of understanding about CSS (which, for some reason, indicates you are of higher status) rather than learning about how it works and doing a bit of memorization.

I personally have no problem doing front-end work when I have to and I think the fact that I don't drag my feet or complain about CSS has allowed me to learn it to a degree that has made it reasonable and quick to do.

Also most of the shitty parts of front-end development have been abstracted away with things like CSS vendor auto-prefixing and tools like ClojureScript and reagent. One of my favorite parts of the stack now, actually (when I can use those tools).

This isn't a web problem, this is a division of labor problem. There's plenty of specialization to be had to as you advance career wise, and by logical progression of the web platform. It sounds like you haven't found the right position fit, which isn't uncommon early in your career.

Totally comiserate with you. I'm not up on all of the latest frameworks but I hate not having a good compiler that catches syntax errors, typos, case mismatch, etc until runtime.