I can't understand how such a huge company can have such a lousy UX.
LWC is worlds better. And the local tooling with the cli and VSCode extensions is miles better than the old Eclipse/Sublime FMT days.
Now, don't talk me about VSCode Extensions. This is the perfect example of an awful dev experience. apex-jorje-lsp.jar with a JVM to parse Apex taking GB of memories, extensions taking dozens of seconds to load (when they load) ... In fact, the only decent LSP is aer, a simple decently working Go binary rather than the monster Salesforce shipped. The one good tooling Salesforce built in the last 15 years is, to some extent, the SF CLI - which came after the `force` CLI from the same guys who built `aer`, anyway. And nowadays, people can use that with their preferred editor from Zed to Vim with shortcuts from built upon the SF CLI.
So no, Salesforce didn't do great with tooling, they just did the bare minimum waiting on the (small) community to give them the right ideas.
And the tooling is heavy, but I’ll repeat, it’s all miles better than it was back then.
We traded janky and sparse for a full suite of pretty great tooling that can be a resource hog.
Remembering the relative simplicity of the old stuff as “better” overall is just rose-tinted glasses.
I think the biggest difference was around providing security and stability barriers between front-end components on the same page, with the intent of allowing you to compose a page that contains your own components and those of other third party applications you've installed with guarantees about how they can (and can't) interact. Not sure they couldn't have tacked that onto another framework, but it comes with enough trade-offs and compromises that I'm not sure anyone else would have wanted to upstream it, so they would have been forking something anyway.
Aura wasn't much fun to work with, was never really feature complete, and not advocating for it... but it actually kind of made sense if you thought about front end with the context of how salesforce did security and multitenancy in mind.