You took “don’t reimplement the browser”, something that is generally incredibly true, and cargo-culted it into placing some old farts on a pedestal just because they were there ‘first’.
I'm not saying these ideas shouldn't be revisited, but if you're going to revisit them, do it at an academic institute, where you can spend time figuring out the problems, not at your commercial job where you have to ship next week, no matter how broken it is.
But my experience is not the same. It has always been others telling the front-end devs what we "need" to have. I am constantly pushing back with "buttons and links should look and act like buttons and links", "right clicks don't belong in CRUD apps", and "we have a select component that does that". But _BUSINESSES_ want their identity and unique perspective baked into the app.
For example, there is a fashion [1] to include hashes in the names of static assets served. But that's what ETag header is invented for, in the RFC since a decade and implemented in all browsers.
[1] (I deliberately call it a fashion, not a standard; would rather say that RFC 7232 is a standard in this particular case)
Or perhaps just that it skews young, which I could believe, and might be easier to find survey data on.