I suspect there's a class of problems, front end development is one, ORM is another; where the problem itself is constrained in such a way that only shitty solutions exist.

ORM keeps sucking because RDBMSes simply don't operate on objects. You can either impose ill conceived object models on the database, or try and fail to capture the database's affordances in objects.

I don't have a theory on what's gone wrong with front-end development to cause its chronic disease, but it may simply be that HTML is a document markup language, and makes a questionable base for a user interface.