But I'm never quite sure why people insist that you cannot do web dev the old school ways of HTML files with a little PHP or other scripting. All of that still works just fine. So when people say they wrote an entirely new system because they miss being able to stay simple like in ye olde days... I'm not sure I understand the connection.
Frameworks exist for Software at Scale (TM). Big Corp has a revolving door of developers and they need cookie cutter tools that isolate the damage a "bad" developer can cause. If you're a solo developer or a small company, then this digital bureaucracy is unnecessary.
Developers leave about every two years. Engineering management want to use technologies that allow for resource flexibility, and those libraries are designed to attract both parties. You, and management, for different reasons.
JSX works well for a component approach because you’re expressing the component in a fully functional programming language. Doing a lot of that work tends to make the developer quite capable in Javascript.
Ah, the sweet sweet nostalgia of XSS
> When I started out, you could just copy HTML files up to your server and you had a website. It was magical! And PHP made it even better; you could just throw in a little snippet of server-side code and you had a dynamic page.
Well, you can still very much do this. Sure, it's not bleeding edge, but large chunks of the web (even newer sites) still do it this way and rely on PHP or sinilar server side languages.
Could build Figma or Google Sheets "with HTML files with a little PHP or other scripting?" I don't see how either app could be developed without significant amounts of "scripting" (i.e. code running in the browser and on the server).