Every time I have to use React, I'm astounded at how convoluted web app development still is in 2024. Am I out of touch or is it really that bad?
Compare that to something like Go which includes all of that stuff out of the box—by and large everyone has just said "yep that seems to work" and stuck with the defaults.
I think the second problem is the browser still fundamentally wants to be a displayer of documents. Yes there has been continued additions of new APIs over the years that have made the SPA pattern much easier to work with, the fact of the matter is you can still save yourself about an order of magnitude of complexity if you can get away with your app being an "old school" multi-page affair.
Sure, the browser environment (DOM etc) introduce plenty of problems, but it's going to be more complex than slapping together CRUD endpoints regardless.
To phrase the comparison a different way: Would the JS ecosystem be better if there was one set of tools everyone agreed on, similar to Go? (The answer is yes.)
There might be future evolution of course, but it feels like Vite is the default for new/retrofitted projects these days.
It used to be that the build system for React added quite a of complexity (when it was webpack), but with modern alternatives like esbuild and vite that's no longer the case either.
Android, iOS, QT, JWT, SWT it is all hell. If anything most modern web environments are way better than most others that came before it.
If a platform is "simpler" than the web it also usually means it is much less powerful.
It gets complicated past that, but that's because trying to mix streamed server generated HTML and client rendered HTML (and often one and then the other in the same piece of UX) is hard to do.