Hah, yeah, there's always anecdotes. I stopped doing frontend a decade or more ago (and even then it had been a smaller and smaller part of my day). But I see the appeal of it. I started front end when we had to buy testing desktops that were beefier so they could run multiple VMware VMs, one with IE3, 4, 5, 5.5.

I remember the delight that our designers had when Javascript came out and my buddy showed that you could do some magic on images and form elements and have an actual checkbox with a check in it, not just a filled or empty box or circle. Or of the dev who thought he'd impress a girl on IRC by updating a prominent site's homepage to have a "Hi Sara" underneath the banner because he could just ftp to prod from his desktop.