I agree with you and think the eternal september effect is probably the largest factor working against advances in frontend dev but would posit a couple more: 1) front end dev is generally underestimated and under respected in terms of complexity, I have had many devs say “you are basically just building a json viewer” over the years which is somewhat true but a great oversimplification 2) the closer you are to the user the more ephemeral and hard to reuse your components are, and business incentives work more strongly against reuse because the higher ups can actually see the work that is being shared.