Its very, opinionated. It has to be! (for now)
I can agree with almost every opinion in the comments, almost everyone is right. But with a strong opinion and a strong mental model there is light at the end of the tunnel.
The future is bright for web applications, and almost everyone in the space is aware of the biggest issues, which is important as the browsers adapt new features to help ease the pain.
Web development is a scary place but it can be enjoyable when the right pieces are in place. Older web applications have crazy hacks and made up anti-patterns to solve problems, which mix context between the client and the server making it a nightmare to wrap your head around or even implement new features.
Often a new feature in such application guides the developer to accept the fate of adding more technical debt, and creates a strong desire for a better way with no way out without a major overhaul of the backend and frontend. I have spent countless hours building patches to older systems just to prepare them for the option of pivoting to more modern approaches.
Today web application development is a fast moving target. Design patterns are changing from framework to framework. Even from framework version to version. i.e Angular 2.
It's almost as if the current state of frontend development is very comb shaped. broad in approaches, and that the community is digging deep into patterns that are showing success in scaling, and performance. We have to deal with various topics, the lack of concurrency, performance of the DOM, managing scope, and state.
I have a few opinionated methodologies to help me in modern web development.
1. Pick a strong frontend and backend frameworks and know them well.
2. Don't mix the backend and the frontend code. Keep the backend API in context to the business domain, data validation, and security. Allow the client to be an independent consumer of the API for portability and scalable distribution.
3. Keep your JSON responses as flat as possible, and avoid deeply nested data structures. Rely on functional programming to map and reduce your data on the client into deeply nested structures if needed.
4. Decide what the client can compute for free computation cycles.
5. Stay as data-driven as possible. Fall back to the server or micro-service if the client is not efficient at a demanding task.
6. Choose libraries with the least restraints and high flexiblity. They should not obfuscate or complicate your ability to implement the design. I find most libraries can assume to much control.
We are in a better place today then we have ever been for web applications. Though the learning curve is intense and the subjects broad. Especially for fullstack developers. I feel that finding what works and an opinion of how it should be done is important.
I am less picky about the backend technolgies as I am with the frontend. I would really only consider Angular, or React for my frontend. Both Angular and React expect you to form a mental model of how they work, and what a build pipeline should look like which is very project specific in my experience.
Its the wild west our here, and expect things to continue to change. Building an opinion, vetting new libraries to add to your toolbox, and experimenting is just part of the web application world.