I can recommend backend people to do frontend once in a while. You don't have to like it. But it will make you a better developer. I've been in more than one team where there was this us and them dynamic and some lack of mutual understanding about why things worked a certain way or limitations and constraints. It can lead to poorly thought through APIs and API responses, which then triggers frontend work to engineer around that. Also, frontend developers tend to have better intuition for asynchronous stuff; because everything in a browser is async. Backend developers tend to be a bit naive on that front.

I'm a hands-on CTO in a very small company. So, if it's technical, I'm doing it. Websites, apps, backends, databases, devops and all the rest. Not always fun. But at this point I can fill every role in a typical product team and do a decent job.

And I agree that what passes for state of the art on the web is a bit meh. Anchors date back to the early days of the web. One of those forgotten features that is still vaguely useful but a bit underused. There's a reason mobile developers prefer native UI toolkits. Browsers are a bit limited and backwards. CSS is a bit of a straight jacket. And Javascript is a bit of a basket case as a language.