I’m not sure why everyone compares frontends to backends as if they are exactly the same. Like it or not, JavaScript has effectively become the de-facto way to build interactive UIs, and backend technologies fill a completely different space.

It’s more helpful to compare JavaScript to other UI technologies, like Swift UI, Android, Java Swing (ew), and other lower level GUI frameworks. In this case, I think the Dev Ex/quality that JavaScript produces is quite high, and good the speed at which you can do cross platform and web development is immense. Hell, you can even share code between frontend and backend. Good luck doing that with another technology.

I will probably get flamed for saying this, but I also think backend is easy. Backends are typically not stateful, and therefore feel like functional programming. You send an input and get an output. Compare that to interactive UIs which need to act as a long lived lifecycle with various state, and it’s clear why frontends are more complex.