Front-end is awful in (large) part because of the tooling IMO. In the backend world, you need to make sure your _vertical_ (aka scale) is respected. It's a matter of your code, your infra plus the tooling to help you. If you're good at what you do, use the correct engineering approaches to have an efficient program and use up to date infrastructure or platforms, and use an up to date language (Rust, Python, Java is excellent here, whatever) you'll have all the tools.
Your ground won't move as long as you didn't ask him to move. So, For me, it's easier to maintain (but still requires a loooot of care and attention to not fall apart)
In the frontend world, as you said, it's movement everywhere. Browsers, JS, JS package managers, CSS and so on. Even if your code don't move, the platform under will. Your code performance is not only dependent of you, making you tied to the evolution if you want to be up to date. That's so hard, and ungrateful...
If you want to stay in the frontend world, you should definitely increase your knowledge in CSS + Responsive, I think it's the best skill.
In JS, stay on par with the language spec. Libraries will come and go, you can learn one (Vue or React, whatever it's the same) to understand the foundations, and it can land you a job basically everywhere.
Backend is easier because it's vertically aligned: performance and stability on a given system that you own.
Frontend is horizontally aligned: acceptable performance and rendering on a shitload of systems which enslave you.
What interested me those last months is another path: Mobile dev, especially with Flutter.
You keep some stability of a fixed OS (you still have the different versions + screen size, but you choose which one to support), and have the tooling of something close to the backend (compiled languages, package manager, big community).
I think you should take a look there if you still want to keep a feet in "client" software, plus you'll never get out of job offers!
i feel like with backend the problems are more concrete and discrete. kind of like 1 + 1 = 2. there is only one correct answer.
with front end things get way more complicated. so many browsers, viewports and you can never be 100% the client will see the same thing that you've been working on for X hours because of the unpredictable environment they test on.
In the frontend world, as you said, it's movement everywhere. Browsers, JS, JS package managers, CSS and so on. Even if your code don't move, the platform under will. Your code performance is not only dependent of you, making you tied to the evolution if you want to be up to date. That's so hard, and ungrateful...
If you want to stay in the frontend world, you should definitely increase your knowledge in CSS + Responsive, I think it's the best skill. In JS, stay on par with the language spec. Libraries will come and go, you can learn one (Vue or React, whatever it's the same) to understand the foundations, and it can land you a job basically everywhere.
Backend is easier because it's vertically aligned: performance and stability on a given system that you own. Frontend is horizontally aligned: acceptable performance and rendering on a shitload of systems which enslave you.
What interested me those last months is another path: Mobile dev, especially with Flutter. You keep some stability of a fixed OS (you still have the different versions + screen size, but you choose which one to support), and have the tooling of something close to the backend (compiled languages, package manager, big community). I think you should take a look there if you still want to keep a feet in "client" software, plus you'll never get out of job offers!