> disproportionately composed of young and/or new and/or self-taught developers who "discover" new paradigms constantly
I've been there since the start, too. I disagree that it's been like that for that long, though. JavaScript was an awkward add-on at first, then a barely usable tool (early vanilla), then a stopgap measure to fix browser compatibility problems (jQuery, moo tools, underscore etc) and start to flesh out some libraries.
But the Angular/React phase was the first time people gravitated toward using the frontend as a proper language. Before then it was just a thing you had to deal with.
So 3 decades? Nah. 2 decades of "why do we have to deal with this" and 1 decade of "ok let's make this work somehow"
I imagine an alternative history where good distributed software got traction.
I have to be honest I don't know what you mean here.
The web and its frontend (and tooling) is what this thread is about. We've thrown out a lot in the mean time. Java applets, Flash/Shockwave, ActiveX, dynamic HTML ... the web has grown a lot and will continue to do so.
But the world of JS as a front-end application language is still fairly new. Until the late 2000s it was just a bolt-on for doing little things around static HTML.
Don't forget Backbone which preceded Angular by checks 7 days.
There's plenty of novel stuff out there, it just takes a long time to filter down to the mainstream. React hooks are probably the best example here: they're a crude approximation of an algebraic effect system from the early 2000s.