You keep mentioning server side state, and that's kind of an issue. Server side state is great, until it isn't. In high volume situations it can become a massive bottleneck (for example, some implementations... rightly, in my mind... lock the session record during a rendering to prevent the obvious kinds of issues, but at the same time, this forces 1 render per user!). On the other hand, every "what's for lunch in the corporate cafeteria today?" app has dreams of becoming used by millions of people, and that means that folks shun server side session state because you get a disaster in any kind of multiple data center scenario.

As someone who spent 3 years battling problems caused by session side server state, while I am sympathetic to your arguments in large part because I think these frameworks are super messy, I have to disagree on this one.

And as someone who started Web development in 1996 using Perl in the CGI model, I can say very clearly that I much prefer where the web is today, if for no other reason that the apps are 100000 times better specifically because of React, Angular, jQuery, and so on. They may be terrible for the developers but they make great apps for users, and ultimately we exist to make apps for users, not ourselves.

J.Ja