alt Hacker News> Putting things on a screen was (is) stupidly simple.
This is why HTML is still a great language for building UIs and that's why Visual Basic had a huge success in the early 90s: drag UI components on a panel, write the callbacks for clicks, save and distribute the exe. Almost anybody could do it.
React and its siblings are much more complicated than that.
It's my belief that we peaked on January 1, 2000. We had successfully released most of the stress baked into the worlds infrastructure with the sudden phase change of "backward compatibility" caused by the IBM 360 series introduction decades earlier.
We had Windows 2000, a server operating system that worked well as a desktop. Both Visual Basic 6 (aka VB6) and Borland Delphi allowed drag and drop GUI application development. Microsoft Office Professional supported most of the features of VB6 while controlling Spreadsheets, Databases, and other documents.
Anyone skilled in a domain other than computing could spend time and put together a reasonably decent application to help with their jobs, and it just worked. You could then call in a professional to clean up edges and make it faster/more reliable if it needed to be scaled.
The documentation was available for pretty much everything, in print, and on screen, with working examples for almost every single function.
It was before the whole .NET distraction, and forcing web pages into everything.
It definitely wasn't perfect... we didn't have widespread version control. No Mercurial or GIT. Mostly, it was numbered PKzip files stored on floppy disks.
We still don't have reliable secure operating systems, I think we've missed that window. Genode was my hope, but it remains a collection of ingredients instead of a daily driver.