The JavaScript ecosystem is insanely successful, even though the language, node_modules, and the entire process of building a SPA are disorganized and clearly poorly designed. What makes it successful though is those flaws exist because individual developers in aggregate have decided that they’re worth the trade off. All the JavaScript killers seem more precisely designed, but that’s only possible because they haven’t been shoe-horned into thousands of different use cases they weren’t meant to solve. Those edge cases add complexity and rough edges, but make for a more practical toolset in the long run.

For a large interactive single page application you probably still want to use React/Vue or similar.

But for a small, simpler app, maybe one you are working on alone, only having a “backend” is appealing.

I’ve been using Alpine on a project recently and removing the overhead of a frontend to manage has made progress faster.