What way of structuring frontend prior to the react/redux 'fad' do you think was superior?
There are a million visual frontend builders out there, and they are all terrible, because you can never get them to do what you want. They are only usable to build example apps, and if used for anything real, require a huge amount of hacking around which results in code that is worse than what it would have been otherwise.
The reason I think it's important to mention this is because I believe that the amount of variability you have to deal with in the web is far greater, which is why I believe these visual frontend builder systems tend to fall apart.
Custom widgets? Amount of work to get them running in one of these is a nightmare.
Compare that to game engines such as Unity or UDK and their editors, it's so bad it's laughable.
I disagree. I had worked with Visual Basic and it had a great balance of ease of use and flexibility. If you are not obsessed with the feeling that you need to see the underlying code of the UI, you can have a great visual builder. Of course you need to code the event handlers, that's pretty much should be the coding required. I am talking about something like webflow + code for event handling.
>require a huge amount of hacking around which results in code that is worse than what it would have been otherwise.
that is because you haven't seen a great implementation yet. and as another commenter mentioned below, mobile UI builders are better because there is a uniformity in mobile design, while desktop (web) design lacks uniformity. It's possible.