The basic idea of declarative forms goes back way further than that. I wrote a Perl library that generated a form from Oracle table metadata 30 years ago, and I very much doubt I was the first one to think of it.

I haven't looked at Golem specifically, but every other approach I've seen breaks down for complicated UIs. User-friendly validation and conditional forms require procedural logic. Invariably the declarative format (JSON in this case) ends up with up with a bunch of programming constructs.

Indeed, this is an old principle, we believe the key here is how we approach it, for instance, if you have a look at our DX layer (the gui.*) you will see how we bridge both worlds:

https://golemui.com/dx/form-definition/overview/

Have a look specially at the tags and selectors