One simple page, with login, logout, some search, and navigation nowadays require a few plugins, router, state management, lib for requests, lib to handle cookies, lib for JWT, etc...
I'm sure some agencies do a fantastic job (those that think about the bigger 'more than just dev' picture). But on 95% of the sites I'm seeing right now the downsides far outweigh the benefits and it feels like dev for the sake of dev.
This is exactly how it looked like when Flash was a popular choice for making web interfaces. We've fought a long, hard battle to finally get back to indexable, interoperable, standards-based HTML, CSS, and JS. It was fine for a while, then Angular happened. Fast-forward a decade and we're right back when we started. Amazing.
I don't see developers making these decisions anymore, not in large web-based tech companies.
My experience has been that management controls a lot of these decisions and/or steers them in the direction that they want them to go. And the more power a manager holds over a team or department, the more influence they can exert to get their way.
As an example, I'm hearing from a colleague in another department that they're being told by an engineering SVP that all new backend services are to be written in NodeJS. These are .NET developers. How does this guy who is 3 layers above these engineers intend to enforce this "rule?" The implication is you can do this or get fired, I guess, so it's happening regardless of how stupid it is. This was all explained to me when I noticed that I had gotten 3 "so long and thanks for all the fish" emails from long-timers in that department.
This is always my thoughts when I start a project with something else .
Now I have used react at a few different sized companies, taught it to some students and completely stopped using it for personal projects. It just seems like too much added complexity for almost every situation and people just see everything as a SPA now.
Vue 3 kinda tanked all that though.
Also there's now two competing APIs. The new one that they want you to use, and the old one that people like better.
Also a lot of time your objects are actually proxies, which I'm sure there's good reason for but that's kind of annoying (personal opinion).
I accept (demand, really) TypeScript but I've become allergic to any attempt to add much more on top of JS than that. I can just see the next poor bastard coming along in a short year or two and going "oh god, WTF is a '.svelte' file? What did my piece of shit predecessor fall for?"
I'm looking into Vue today. Possibly I'll settle on something even simpler.
React's certainly out, and thank god the mood is finally shifting enough that I can abandon it without harming my career (much). Slow, janky, and god they've made some weird choices with it in the last few years. It was always a bit heavy, but it felt like it had some degree of elegance to it before that—if only in parts of the API itself, not the implementation.
[EDIT] Oh good lord, '.vue'. Don't any of these just use normal-ass code? Sigh.
I'll admit it's annoying but it's still just "normal-ass code". Vue, for instance, is just html, JavaScript and css. A .vue file is just all three in one file with special syntax to indicate each section.
At least, last I looked at vue it was.
And I say that as someone who is currently refactoring a Vue 3 app from JS/VueX to TypeScript/Pinia ... oh the irony.
Nothing beats adding a script tag in the footer and being done with project setup.