I am a full stack and I use React for the front-end and for me React is not hard. Why? Hear me out. All this talk about k8s being hard is real but not a bad thing. Why? Because our tech and our jobs are hard. Like you said to a non front-end person React from your POV is hard. As much as k8s is hard for a back-end or front-end guy. And that's how you have so many articles about X and Y being so complex and hard, and 90% of the time they are written by people that never really used it and it's not even their job. But then if you ask a front-end dev if he love React and if it's hard for him? At the beginning maybe but now? No. A back-end with Spring/Rails/Next.js... All the same maybe at the beginning but now? No. But try to cross the bridges without being already good at the other stack and this being your daily job; it's always hard.

As a side example I played fighter jet simulators (Falcon BMS, and DCS) and I stopped to play them for a year. Before I could fly and do a full cold start of the F14 [1], the F16, the KA-50, the SU-27 (ok this one is super easy), and I was learning the A10. Now I am looking at all these buttons and I am like: how was I able to do this?? Dang! But when I was into it, it was super easy. That's really the same here. You have the opposite of a honey moon period. At first it's (super) hard, and then it gets super easier and easier and it looks like you are a wizard to others.

And it was the same for me back in the day where people were doing crazy stuff with Mesos. They looked like wizard to me. Then I dived into Mesos, Raft, Peloton, etc... And now it no longer looks so crazy and scary.

I am sure you are doing stuff that look so easy to you but are super hard to others who work on a different part of the stack.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7oC_Qwq0-w (because it's so cool)