In the win32/MFC days, there was no "front-end developer". There was only HTML and content creators writing it.

Then there came small web applications, and still no "front-end developers", since functionality could only work on the server.

It's only when AJAX was introduced in the mid 2000's that you could start to talk about "front-end developers".

By that time, win32 and MFC was old. We had Java, C# with .net framework, etc.