How was React designed to "avoid the build step" or "make View Source useful"?
Because the source was too complex.
Now we want to expose the source and get rid of the abstraction... Why?
Because the abstraction is too complex.
Recurse and repeat.
TypeScript ecosystem is the Enterprise Java of this decade, except it's built on shakier foundations, i.e. you can run some ancient JVM, but good luck relying on an ancient browser version & node dependencies. There will probably still be tons of job-security in the next couple decades, but it's not forward-looking technologically.
Ironically you mention the jvm which further proves the existence of the flat circle.
We've done it before... We will do it again.
At some point wysiwyg editors fell out of favor as they generated both unmaintainable styles and markup.
Style sheets took hold and the insanity that was inline styles were dropped in favor of external style sheets.
Today we have tailwinds.css and inline styles are coming back in vogue.
Wysiwyg editors are coming back in the form of code generators that convert designs into react components.
This author is even a proponent of inline event handlers which were the standard way of doing things before JavaScript really became a powerful language and added "addEventlistener".
Flat circle repeated over and over again.
Part of me wonders if these authors are just too young to remember those days. Otherwise why wouldn't they mention the historical context when writing these kind of articles?
It's funny when younger people espouse these new ideas as new and revolutionary when really they are a return to older patterns that fell out of style for whatever reason and are now being resold with different packaging.
Thus, History is doomed to repeat itself as software technology moves horizontally forever, with practitioners never knowing if the current abstraction was better than the previous one.