i’ve been thinking about this for a while. the frontend world moves fast, and that’s great. things should evolve, tools should get better, developer experience should improve. i’m all for that. but sometimes it feels like we’re running in random directions instead of moving forward together.

react, vue, svelte, solid, angular, next, nuxt, astro, remix, qwik… the list keeps growing. and most of them are genuinely good. that’s not the problem. the problem is, it feels a bit chaotic. like, are we building on top of each other, or are we just starting over every two years?

the good stuff

let me be clear, i’m not against frameworks. i use astro for this site and i love it. modern tools solve real problems. better performance, better developer experience, better user experience. all good things.

and honestly, the web in 2025 is way more powerful than it was ten years ago. we can build things today that were impossible before. i’m not one of those people who say “just use html and jquery” because that’s not realistic either. things change, and they should.

but something feels off

my issue is not with the tools themselves. it’s with the speed and the direction. every year there’s a new way to do the same thing. and every time, people say this one is different, this one solves everything. until the next one comes out and we start over.

it feels uncontrolled. like nobody sat down and said “okay, what do we actually need?” instead, everyone just builds their own solution and hopes it sticks. some do, most don’t, and developers are left switching between things every couple of years.

the frontend tax

starting a new project today is… a lot. pick a framework, pick a css solution (there’s like 15), set up typescript, configure bundlers, choose a state library. you haven’t written any product code yet and you already spent half a day on setup.

i call this the frontend tax. and it keeps going up. not because the tools are bad, but because there’s just too many choices and none of them feel permanent. you pick something today and you’re not sure if it’ll still be relevant in two years.

the cycle

this is what bothers me the most. ten years ago, websites were server-rendered. php, rails, whatever. then we moved everything to the client with javascript. then realized it was slow. then invented server-side rendering again. now we have server components, islands, partial hydration…

i mean, we’re solving real problems for sure. but sometimes it feels like we’re solving problems we created ourselves. and every solution creates three new problems, and then we need three new tools for those. it’s a cycle.

are we going the right way?

i don’t have the answer honestly. but i think we should ask this question more often. not “which framework is the best” but “are we going in the right direction?”

progress should feel like building a road. you go forward, step by step. right now, frontend feels like building ten roads at the same time, all going to different places, and nobody knows which one will actually get there.

i’m not saying stop. i’m saying maybe slow down a bit and think. the tools are great. the talent is there. we just need a bit more direction and a bit less chaos.

the web should evolve. but evolving and being lost are two different things.