Using PHP and other tools/frameworks that tightly coupled the frontend to the backend codebase made life miserable. While I was excited to get into web development back when these technologies were popular, they were anything but pleasant to use.
With the introduction of Angular 1.x and eventually React, Vue, and Svelte -- creating web apps finally felt productive, easy to debug, and easy to ship. Wiring up interactions finally felt intuitive. No more jQuery code colliding with itself as you struggle to organize your project and cobble together a bunch of poorly maintained "component" libraries and pray they work together without obvious user-facing bugs on your site or app.
Or worse: on a team of engineers.
I won't lie, learning how early build systems worked was a pain, but the curve was completely worth it, and I wouldn't change a thing. Today, using tools like Vite with their default project templates is almost too easy, and you can hit the ground running in no time.
Publishing to Vercel, Netlify, and other modern hosting stacks is a breeze, and they all support direct tie-ins with every popular package & build system.
With the introduction of Angular 1.x and eventually React, Vue, and Svelte -- creating web apps finally felt productive, easy to debug, and easy to ship. Wiring up interactions finally felt intuitive. No more jQuery code colliding with itself as you struggle to organize your project and cobble together a bunch of poorly maintained "component" libraries and pray they work together without obvious user-facing bugs on your site or app.
Or worse: on a team of engineers.
I won't lie, learning how early build systems worked was a pain, but the curve was completely worth it, and I wouldn't change a thing. Today, using tools like Vite with their default project templates is almost too easy, and you can hit the ground running in no time.
Publishing to Vercel, Netlify, and other modern hosting stacks is a breeze, and they all support direct tie-ins with every popular package & build system.