Is MVC frameworks required in front end?

This feels a bit backwards for me - MVC fits very well into the front-end where the entire application can be run, and the back-end is treated as data-storage only. MVC on the server has always been problematic because the way the View portion is supposed to work is not quite how it ends up really working. Back-end MVC frameworks aren't quite really MVC, I don't think. The term has been bastardized pretty freely over the years.

Don't even get me started on how many of these back-end frameworks think that data storage is supposed to happen in the Model ;)