>>Reminds me of working on an old Windows UI

Me too, in a different way. It provides a very clear view of how MVC moves from the back end to the front end. Coupled with other things that have moved more of the meat of the work to the browser, you end up in a funny circular place.

At a high level, it starts to look much more like the pre-web client/server model of "fat clients" written in MS/MFC, or C/X11/Motif/Qt/etc, and the backend relegated to mostly serving centralized data or events.

What's old is new again I suppose. The browser, in general, feels like a giant step forward. I wish, though, that some ecosystem had evolved where Javascript wasn't the sole supported client side language.