This difference is in complexity that gets imposed by buzzwords, but not in the actual behavior itself. Most frontend “code” is just a wearisome repetition of passing things down and signalling them up with few leaky abstractions to make this pointless job even more complex.

Look around, the internet is basically the same forms that we had in the 90s, only with auto-“post” on every event. There’s zero enormous difference except for constant representational state transfer back and forth. That’s why people describe htmx and co as a breath of fresh air.

Maybe avoid telling this tale about modern frontenders adding immense value - they do not, on average. It’s good that this is over.

A small JS app like this blog has ~65k lines of code, across 900+ files. That doesn't include the written content, only the JavaScript and TypeScript.

Interesting how big is the user-facing part, i.e. the static text that a regular visitor sees.