This is a really good observation. If I can add on, I feel like a lot of the disagreements in modern front end development boil down to this: Some people actually like developing with HTML/CSS, and other people see it as an implementation detail and would rather abstract it away with JavaScript.

People in the first camp tend to like Vue, CSS/Sass, Htmx, server rendering, etc.

People in the second camp like React and React Native, CSS-in-JS, Tailwind, etc.