So he says most of the functionality is maintained in the frontend now thanks to these frameworks and then complains he spent 32 hours in frontend coding as opposed to 4 hours backend - what split was he considering should have been adequate?
He's missing the point entirely. User interface programming is hard. And time-consuming. The discussion about client Vs server side is simply talking about where to shift this burden.
right that's my point, he's moved the burden around and then is surprised that the burden on one side is really big now.