The never ending random walk of front end / back stack configurations suggests there might be some missing constraint. This allows a whole family of near equivalent approaches (at least superficially) but it fails to select the proverbial "right tool for the job" and let us move on to other challenges.
Use cases have not changed dramatically in the past decade yet there is constant churn. Some of it may be self-excited and basically just self-reinforcing fads, manias and other such noise which create its their own reality.
But some of it maybe due to some sort of degeneracy (seeking an optimum around a flat region). Maybe people ignore or poorly evaluate an important dimension (e.g complexity, long term mantainance costs etc) that if taken properly into account would reduce the ambiguity.
In any case this never ending debate needs to get a bit deeper to avoid going around in endless circles. It does not reflect well on the ability of the entire community to allocate resources in some thoughtful manner.
I think an important driver in this is a persistent desire for (and faith in) novelty.
Every engineer has had unpleasant experiences with some giant convoluted messes. And there's a strong tendency to blame for that at the feet of the tools/stack/language of those messes, and believe that if we just choose something different, this time it will be clean and perfect.
Of course, some or all of that blame is undeserved. "Giant convoluted mess" is the state toward which every project will tend over time. But that rarely diminishes the totemic belief that new tools will produce different results, so an impetus toward novelty-for-novelty's-sake remains persistent.
To be honest there is never going to be an optimal solution here, because every 2nd engineer is gonna want to reinvent the wheel and do it their way, and then sell their “way” since they invested so much time into it.
Use cases have not changed dramatically in the past decade yet there is constant churn. Some of it may be self-excited and basically just self-reinforcing fads, manias and other such noise which create its their own reality.
But some of it maybe due to some sort of degeneracy (seeking an optimum around a flat region). Maybe people ignore or poorly evaluate an important dimension (e.g complexity, long term mantainance costs etc) that if taken properly into account would reduce the ambiguity.
In any case this never ending debate needs to get a bit deeper to avoid going around in endless circles. It does not reflect well on the ability of the entire community to allocate resources in some thoughtful manner.