> All of the virtual ink in this article, and honestly most of the complexity in the field overall... and it seems to really all just boil down to, 'I think this looks cooler.'

IMO there's significant complexity in building a feature-rich frontend client. The "thicker" the client, the worse it gets. There's definitely a lot of 'I think this looks cooler' going around, but also we shouldn't forget that the need to come up with something better is partially a response to very real, very-not-imagined, frontend complexity.