I'm so glad I'm not the only one thinking this. I built a medium-complexity, money-making, production-grade app in Next.js and started out on Vercel's hosting (and Google Firebase) and then moved to hosting myself and stripping out Firebase, replacing it with Pocketbase.

Pocketbase was the ONLY good thing about this journey. Everything else sucked just so terribly.

Infinite complexity everywhere, breaking changes CONSTANTLY, impenetrable documentation everywhere.

It is just so, so awful. If we rewound the last five years of FE trends and instead focused on teaching the stuff that existed at the time properly, we'd be in a much better position.

I've also built a very complex React frontend (few thousand users, pretty heavy visual computation required in many places). And while I don't particularly like React either, Next.js was even worse.

And lastly, built a CMS in Go, with vanilla JS. And while the DX sometimes feels lacking, I just can't help but feel that I actually know wtf is going to happen when I do something. Why is that so hard?

In React and Next.js I am STILL, AFTER SIX YEARS constantly guessing what might happen. Yes, I can fix just about anything these frameworks throw at me, thanks to all the experience I've gathered about their quirks, but it all just feels to messy and badly designed.

In Go, the last time I guessed what might happen was in the first six months of learning it. No surprises since. Codebases from years ago are still rock-solid.

Why can't we do this at the frontend, goddammit?

" Codebases from years ago are still rock-solid." This is the biggest thing for me. I recently pulled down an 8 year old hobby Java/Maven project I had and it compiled and ran perfectly on the first try. Imagine trying to get an 8 year old javascript project to work...

I think the big complex FE frameworks are going to go away. After doing work with HTMX and Alpine JS, and Ruby on Rails with Turbo + Stimulus, I am all in on this paradigm. Basic JS, or a micro front end framework is all you really need.

it might be a bit over the top but there is Cogent Core[0]; it supports apps on desktop, mobile apps, and the web. it even supports 2d and 3d. and it's all in go, backend and frontend (using WASM).

[0] https://github.com/cogentcore/core