But it's been like this for more than a decade now.
Frontend work is unglamorous to a lot of developers but part of the more academic appeal is that it's still very much in its awkward teenage phase. That makes it appealing to tinker with and try to find a "better way." That's the churn.
It's been like that for at least 3 decades - which is how long I've been doing such work. I disagree with your assessment of it being an "awkward teenage phase". The rate of churn is accelerating while nothing really new theory-wise has been added. I agree with the parent post:
> disproportionately composed of young and/or new and/or self-taught developers who "discover" new paradigms constantly
I've been there since the start, too. I disagree that it's been like that for that long, though. JavaScript was an awkward add-on at first, then a barely usable tool (early vanilla), then a stopgap measure to fix browser compatibility problems (jQuery, moo tools, underscore etc) and start to flesh out some libraries.
But the Angular/React phase was the first time people gravitated toward using the frontend as a proper language. Before then it was just a thing you had to deal with.
So 3 decades? Nah. 2 decades of "why do we have to deal with this" and 1 decade of "ok let's make this work somehow"
> 36 years at least. I'm not talking about WWW. HTML and JS were never meant to be the end-all of human computer interaction, but yet here we are.
I have to be honest I don't know what you mean here.
The web and its frontend (and tooling) is what this thread is about. We've thrown out a lot in the mean time. Java applets, Flash/Shockwave, ActiveX, dynamic HTML ... the web has grown a lot and will continue to do so.
But the world of JS as a front-end application language is still fairly new. Until the late 2000s it was just a bolt-on for doing little things around static HTML.
That is my complaint. And yes, I don't know what I'm looking for. All I can say is that the stack that I used 35 years ago was just as good as what I use today. An even more senior developer than myself says it this way. Humans achieve a certain level of complexity and sophistication in any given domain and have an hard time increasing it. I think we've arrived at that point with UX frameworks, and we did decades ago.
> The rate of churn is accelerating while nothing really new theory-wise has been added.
There's plenty of novel stuff out there, it just takes a long time to filter down to the mainstream. React hooks are probably the best example here: they're a crude approximation of an algebraic effect system from the early 2000s.
Frontend work is unglamorous to a lot of developers but part of the more academic appeal is that it's still very much in its awkward teenage phase. That makes it appealing to tinker with and try to find a "better way." That's the churn.