You can indeed do so, but it requires a skillset way behind new grads, bootcamps and giving up the prevailing leadership mantra of "All engineers are fungible so just throw that random team over to learn React and it'll be fine".

Front End Engineer roles pay less than general Software Development Engineers at pretty much every FAANG and so you see a lot of FEEs want to transition. Not much senior talent gets kept in that kind of pipeline.

Google Maps from a decade ago was pretty decent. There's also GMail from around when it was new. That was all on crappier client hardware too.

Note that I didn't say anything about their _current_ incarnations…