I came up in a similar era, I don’t think back fondly on those messes. Doing a modern app with accessibility, mobile support, real time updates, visualizations, and maybe a few PWA features with just jQuery sounds incredibly unpleasant.
I’m waiting for the HTMX hype train to meet reality too. Programming your app in pseudo attributes with a DSL is going to wear thin quickly.
I think that many websites even nowadays don't need all that jazz and many would improve if less JavaScript was on them. How many times have you loaded a website only to watch a couple of JavaScript "spinners" for everything to load only to click somewhere and everything started again? MS Azure management is one of such sites.
SPA with real time updates, complex layouts to be mobile-friendly, real-time updates of many components, endless scrolling and PWA features would be a total PITA. Yes, I don't disagree.
The vast majority of web apps I have seen so far don't need to be like that.
I’m waiting for the HTMX hype train to meet reality too. Programming your app in pseudo attributes with a DSL is going to wear thin quickly.