The JavaScript era happened because we were fed a line
As a &#x27;somewhat&#x27; outsider (having found interest in the web mainly via asm.js and WASM) my take on the framework mess is this:<p>It&#x27;s all about problems with the DOM, specifically about three problems: it&#x27;s too opinionated, too inflexible and on top baked into browsers.<p>Javascript frameworks try to provide solutions to those problems, but they can only hide them, not fundamentally fix them. Because they can only implement their idea of how a &#x27;perfect DOM&#x27; would look like by adding more code layers on top of it, but not <i>replace</i> it.<p>The alternative is to do everything yourself in a canvas, but now 90% of the browser&#x27;s features are useless, because they are all integrated with the DOM.<p>And that is the root of all problems: the browser lacks a proper API layer model where the low level layers (2D canvas, WebGL, WebGPU) sit at the bottom, medium level layers (e.g. for text, image and vector rendering, a layout engine and an accessability API) sits in the middle, and on top of everything the DOM. Instead all we have is either too inflexible and too high level (the DOM) or too low level for many tasks (WebGL or WebGPU).<p>Same for audio btw, there should be a low level streaming API at the bottom, a medium level &#x27;mixer API&#x27;, and WebAudio should only come in on top of those (or even kicked out of the browser and implemented in a JS or WASM library).<p>...of course this all means: lets get even more Javascript and WASM into web pages, which will anger the &#x27;web boomers&#x27; greatly I guess :D