You still can build websites this way. I was the first hire at my current company, I got to pick the stack of our frontend repo from the first commit. If you stay away from NextJS, things only improved since those heydays.

We're running tanstack-router, tanstack-query, and using vite underneath. That's about it. Each of these libraries are better and simpler than the standard redux/react-router/webpack from back in the day.

I've got lifelong backend developers reasonably (And somewhat happily) productive with the codebase.