This team didn't build front end experiences but tried to build out tooling in which other devs would. Which was weird to me given that we didn't do anything extraordinary in terms of experience so off the shelf stuff should have worked.
I think this was some evidence towards the point in this article. Two things were at play:
First, the gross complexity of the available frameworks made it seem like something like this was necessary.
Second, the people involved were excited to further their careers on this, so motivation to call out unneeded complexity was low.
If I had owned this space from the start, I'd have asked the question of "what business outcomes does this enable which we can't achieve at least for a while, with static-ish html, forms, etc" and maybe allow a little complexity where justified. But since it was purely engineering owned for a few years before it got to me, it was way too late to reign the complexity and we ended up doing shit like porting from one framework to another.