I think modern FE won over is primarily because it provides with Decorator OO, which has been recommended for GUI development including by the GoF for ages, which also matches perfectly with a tag-based declarative language such as HTML. As such, ditching the "HTML templates" paradigm was a no brainer for OO devs to start with. For many, "templates", their performance, their restricted mini language and all the boilerplate that comes with it, just had to die.
But then, with Angular/React/etc, you now not only have 1 project on your hands but 2 different projects that must be compatible: the backend and the frontend. These 2 different projects ought to be in 2 different languages, unless you are developing backend in JS too - maybe there's even an ORM that can generate migrations these days for NodeJS ! But that wasn't the case last time I checked, also loosing the ability to have server side rendering without the additional effort of deploying a rendering server with all that comes with it.
People ditched jQuery saying that vanilla JS was just fine, but it turned out not to be quite the case so there are still releases of jQuery, and at the same time NodeJS was released and npm and then Angular/React/etc which in my opinion created with two goals in mind 0. having OO components for GUI dev and 1. offer IoC to overcome the difficulty of dealing with custom component lifecycle like in jQuery which leaves you to monitor the DOM and instantiate / destroy each plugin by yourself. Idk if there are other reasons, but it seems to me that apart from that, that DHTML is still pretty much the same: you're adding some logic to change tags and attributes, anyway.
Today we have a chance to break these silos again with the Web Components and ESM browser feature and W3C standard because it does solves elegantly the problems that React/etc seemed to be designed for and do no impose a frontend framework, you can just load the script in your page and start using ... The browser will manage the Component lifecycle efficiently, and devs can use it in their templates without having to load a framework so everybody wins.
This is also a chance to simplify our code, levitate by throwing away dependencies. Of course if you want to do full client side navigation with an API backend you still can, but you can make generic components that you will also be able to reuse in other projects that do not use a particular framework. You need no tool to make a web component, this is an example of a jquery plugin that was ported to a web component which has no dependency, with browser tests in Python: https://yourlabs.io/oss/autocomplete-light/-/blob/master/aut...
Webpack does a lot, still slow for development be we're seeing the light with Snowpack and esbuild, allowing to have webpack in production only (ie. to generate a bundle in Dockerfile) and benefit from actually instant reload thanks to ESM.
So if you go for web components and snowpack, you get an extremely lightweight toolkit which I love that will work for every page that's not an overly complicated web app. But then I thought I actually don't have so much frontend code, it would be nice to have it along with the backend code, so we went for a python->js transpiler to develop web components in pure python which also replace templates, it was surprisingly fast to implement: https://yourlabs.io/oss/ryzom#javascript
Is this improving the situation or not depends on your POV, heck I'd understand if you even hold it against me, but the frontend development tooling is still evolving for sure, and I can see how the browsers are doing efforts (except Safari) to simplify DHTML development, because:
“There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.” – C.A.R. Hoare, The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture