Four Eras of JavaScript Frameworks
  > JavaScript was first released in 1995. Like I mentioned
  > above, I started writing JS in 2012, almost two decades
  > later, near the beginning of the era I’m dubbing the
  > First Frameworks.
  > [...]
  > This contrasted pretty significantly with mobile apps
  > when they started to hit the scene. From the get go,
  > mobile apps on iOS and Android were full applications
  > written in Serious Languages™ like Objective C and Java.

I'm going to make a small jump to conclusions and guess the author is too young to have accurate memories of what web development was like pre-2010.Gmail was released in 2004, Google Maps in 2005, Google Docs in 2006. All of those used JavaScript technologies (GWT and Closure) that enabled web UIs to go head-to-head with native applications of the era. There was an entire generation of JS frameworks (maybe two?) that rose and fell before the release of the iPhone.The primary difference between GWT/Closure and what we've got now is that JavaScript was treated as a compilation target, not a developer platform. The tooling was all in Java or C++, there was no concept of writing a transpiler or bundler in JavaScript and no culture of standalone JS interpreters. IIRC the only option at the time for running JS on the server was Rhino (based on Netscape/Mozilla), which for whatever reason never saw the broad adoption of Node.