However I feel that front end developer has a clear advantage in that their work can be played with, viewed and commented on by non technical managers and product owners. Also other external praise is usually along the lines of 'this looks great', 'the ui is so smooth' than direct praise of what for the most part is unseen backend work.
Many backend quality improvements for products can be deployed without a product owner ever realising yet a front end and crucially visual change is obvious. The product owner can go play with the new slick drop down menu, they however can't go and easily play with the additional resiliency that you've added to the internal message infrastructure for example.
Like you mentioned though these are generalisations and I too have seen exceptions :)