That exactly describes me. I'm not a good frontend person. I got really, really good at building desktop GUIs in Swing (Java) back in the day and really imprinted on that way of doing things. When moving to web, I found the the display landscape really challenging to grok. I read a few books and got to where I could get most of what I wanted done, but it always took me way longer than it felt like it should, and certainly much longer than it took my coworkers. In that period I learned the contemporary patterns of the day and got pretty good at using component libraries with frameworks like React and was finally able to make things look and behave more like I wanted them to.

Because at that point so much of the focus was on javascript and component libs/frameworks, I didn't (and mostly still don't) really follow browser development. I looked into things like web components when they were first talked about but found their DX to be quite sub-par (it was still pretty early days) and haven't really looked again.

I'm personally much more interested in systems, infrastructure, devops, and all things backend, so for me frontend is a necessary evil to enable me to surface controls for my stuff to users. It's not that I don't want to stay up to speed and current, it's more that in my limited bandwidth I'm more focused on what I care about. That leads to exactly the pattern you described: I learned and got comfortable with a certain paradigm in a different time, and those ways are quite engrained.

Anyway, thank you for your comment. It really helped me identify a blind spot I previously had (which I intend to rectify) :-)