The last decade of front-end engineering

Here are some claims about front-end engineering: An era in front-end engineering began around 2016, when (i) React and Angular (and some successors) took off and (ii) a critical mass of users ran hardware and browsers that could support modern Web experiences. This era was way, way different from what came before it. If you have never tried to implement a non-trivial front end without the abstractions that modern Web frameworks offer, it will not be easy to grasp how big this difference is. Front-end coding, more than other environments, tends to be fundamentally asynchronous. (Things happen slowly; latency is less predictable; many things are happening at once; inputs are less predictable.) Asynchrony tends to break our brains. Relatedly, and I say this with nothing but love for my craft and its community, a lot of front-end code was and is quite poor. In every corner in tech I know of, and by every measure of code quality I can think of, front-end code tends to be worse than other…