This is something that recently also crossed my mind. I haven't really done frontend developing for at least 10 years know, but I am already old enough to remember the time in the late 2000s when suddenly everyone stopped developing web GUIs by hand and used frameworks, and anyone still writing HTML, CSS, JS and database queries by hand was ridiculed. Job offers suddenly stopped asking for PHP / HTML / CSS / SQL / JS skills and demanded Ruby on Rails and Django and Spring and GWT, later Angular skills.

It really feels strangely familiar to me: you could get very far very quickly without any real deeper knowledge and have a working web application within a few minutes. It felt like magic. Then you could customize it within the framework by skimming documentation and googling around until... you couldn't, because you had no clue how any of this really worked internally. And just like with vibe-coded web apps, you could recognize the standard framework web app that was patched together in an afternoon from a mile away, but it very much impressed managers.

Amusingly, I sometimes find that developers talk about their go-to frontier model in the same way that GUI developers talked about their favorite web framework ~15-20 years ago. Personification of the tool, even identification with it, frustration that things that worked with version X got worse with version X.1, "I am developing things 10x faster now", "I am going back to writing XYZ by hand", etc.