What happened is speed. You need to ship fast or you're dead. The need for speed is not just because of commercial dynamics, also because of another major industry failure: programmer productivity did not scale up.
2 decades ago it was expected that by now we would be on 5G languages. Where you basically are modelling applications instead of coding them. This never actually happened, we're mostly at 3G still. Which is relatively low level grunt coding, error prone, repetitive, etc.
In fact, sometimes we even sink below 3G. Recently Chrome shipped a feature that allows a developer to tell whether the internal layout engine should regularly update a section of an HTML document or not. Whilst performance optimization is admirable, it really is kind of ridiculous that a developer has to involve himself in paint cycles and GPU stuff. There's even articles telling you how to write JavaScript in such a way that the bytecode compiler runs slightly faster.
What??
I'll continue with another example, to show my age. In the 90s, I used Borland Delphi quite a lot. It's basically drag and drop UI building and then you connect code with events. Incredibly intuitive and productive. An the app would be lightning fast, much faster than today's "desktop" software running on hardware a 100 times more powerful.
30 years later, and we're hand coding for the web. There's no robust layout builder. No standard library. Not even a standard development environment, we have to cherry pick it together.
With productivity this low, and needing to ship fast, the only solution is to build another crappy abstraction on top of the pile of garbage.
Importantly, this often fails. It doesn't actually lead to higher productivity, rather even more complexity. Nor does it typically improve the user experience.
Why does it continue anyway? Because the person suggesting that framework never pays the price. When the choice starts to hurt, they are long gone. Some other poor sucker will be maintaining that ancient Angular project.
Which brings me to my final point: the profession of software architect seems to be dead entirely. It's just coders now, making seemingly random short term choices. But I guess that is the modern state of the world: extremely short term. Nobody does anything proper or fundamental anymore.
I should start a blog too.