Also, and it seems like this has to be pointed out in every one of these threads, the complexity of interfaces we're building on the web now is far greater than what we were building 10 years ago.
I have Python + Tkinter code that’s close to two decades old and still runs great (doesn’t look great tho but it didn’t look great at the time either).
I have some vanilla JS websites that are about as old and still work great.
As other commenters have noted, boring stable choices are there. Ignoring them for the fancy novel brittle stuff is entirely on the programmer.
All of those are good in theory but don't stand against the demands of modern consumers.
If as a technologist you can’t imagine companies making money selling software to happy customers without relying on the brittle trendy framework du jour, my only advice would be to spend less time making silly bets with strangers on internet discussion boards and more time looking at boring profitable companies.
They don't care about React or htmx. They just want something that fixes the problem.
This is actually very freeing: meet a real need and you don't have to believe that software development consists on running on a treadmill of constant changes for their own sake. Just do the job competently.
Most of the time it is dictated by the whims of corporate(by making frameworks/tools as part of a job requirement) or by the mob(teams need to collective decide what technology to use).
You sincerely believe that devs will just add complexity to their work just because?
Meanwhile when I go out in the world I see all manner of front-ends being actively used. It's almost like different users want different things idk.