Then you've invented Visual Basic in the 90s, WordPress in the 00s and I don't know Squarespace or something in the last decade. For business cases beyond that, this is simply not how "the backend" works.
Second, the graphical niceties of these platforms often run "in-process", and save what is basically code in the same database as content. This will anger most Smalltalk fans, but I think this style of development is a bad idea. I want to know that some folder full of source code is the program, and some other folder is the data, and that if I back up one or the other, it will be independently usable.
I'm not saying 90s IDEs were perfect, but I don't think there's been any successful successor to their style of development. Graphical GUI builders exist, but they usually don't support making web apps, and after working with modern JS GUI frameworks, manually syncing GUI state with app state seems antiquated and needlessly bug-prone. I suppose QML with Qt Creator comes closest.
You probably don’t want to know how Electron works then!
That would be completely ordinary with Smalltalk.
"Within each project, a set of changes you make to class descriptions is maintained. … Using a browser view of this set of changes, you can find out what you have been doing. Also, you can use the set of changes to create an external file containing descriptions of the modifications you have made to the system so that you can share your work with other users."
1984 Smalltalk-80 The Interactive Programming Environment page 46
https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/FreeBooks/TheInteractivePr...