this comment turned into a bit of a personal rant, apologies.
I really liked this post, because it touches on so many things that I have to build as well at the moment. I'm building a configuration management interface; the front-end is basically authentication and heaps of forms, the back-end transforms it into XML and uses some shell scripts to rsync them to servers and SNMP to trigger a deployment. But the users have worries about overwriting each other's work, they ask for undo / revert support, and there's things like audit logging, user and permissions management, etc involved.
At the moment I'm slowly building all of that with a React/TS front end and a Go backend using a REST API, just trying to be as tidy and complete as possible. But it's a lot of work, and I'm afraid that once I get to things like versioning, locking, undo / revert, auditing and permissions, my fairly straightforward codebase will just explode in complexity, with each endpoint having loads of documentation and code to represent the different concerns. Client- and server-side validation is another concern, importing existing data, migrating user data from a staging to production environment, etc.
It's a lot. It's a project that should be done by a full team of developers, maybe even multiple but ATM I'm doing it on my own.
I'll never finish it. I'm currently trying to plough through and make sure everything is set up, but I'm hoping we'll get a big financial injection and I'd be able to hire a bunch of consultants (that I'm familiar with as being decent if expensive developers).
I don't know how the previous guy managed to get as far as he did on the older version, other than being a mediocre but productive and persistent developer for all that time, seeing the whole thing grow over time instead of trying to reach feature parity with a product nine years in the making.