The backend has definitely suffered from "crazy hype-driven development" for the last 30 years. Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, PHP, Scala, Clojure, Go, Rust have all had their brief moment as the silver bullet. Not to mention ops tooling - Vagrant, Docker, Kubernetes, Puppet, Chef, Ansible.

I wasn't alive in the 1970s, but I'm guessing that those who were would say it was just as faddish then as well.