For smallish or personal sites I'm 100% on board. For a large enterprise-y app, which in a previous era would have been a rich client deployable, the benefits of these hulking UI frameworks outweighs the costs.
I'm unconvinced. In a ticket I just took over, we need to update the options in a drop down in a modal. Django and react. The PR I took over has already touched nearly a dozen files, and tests have not yet even been written to count towards that.
This should be like three files max (one, ideally) on the BE and similar on the FE. Things I used to 15 years ago in a few minutes takes _hours_ even when you know what you are doing.
So many sites these days are so bloated and slow as to be unusable. Those of us devs who chose the other approach have to work harder no doubt but our users are much happier. Isn't that the goal, after all?
My current users value speed of feature release over almost anything else, because the system needs to adapt to their rapidly changing business rules.
In my previous job, correctness was the most highly valued attribute, followed by adherence to consistent design across the org (which was large, and produced many sites that a user would navigate between all-but unknowingly).
In either case, if I'd gone on a HTML purity rampage, I would not have been helping my users in any meaningful way.
