WordPress got into 'this' state because the modern frontend is in 'this' state itself.
For a decade now people kept criticizing WordPress for 'not being modern' and pushed all the ills that the modern frontend is afflicted with onto the project. They eventually caved in and added some 'modernity' to the project.
But not after ~4 years later, the zero-interest economy ends, stock values plummet, VC money dries up and organizations and people start looking for efficiency in their stacks to cut development and cloud costs, and voila - server-side rendering is cool again, serving static pages or plain HTML to the users is better and it turns out that our frontend stack has become unnecessarily complicated and not every app or site needed total DOM manipulation capabilities.
But the damage was done - React made its way into WP which already had well-fleshed-out, long-existing code and systems that were fulfilling all the purposes it and its users needed and complicated everything.
It feels like this is happening because mainstream tech is adopting WordPress more and bringing its biases and preferences to its community:
I see people asking about how they can rip off the WordPress frontend and use it as a 'headless cms' with a react or another complicated frontend that they absolutely don't need to use for the purpose they intend to build their site or app: Ie you're just making a custom e-commerce site. You arent going to pitch to VCs who may care about this kind of stuff, you are going to sell to actual end users who don't give a crap about your stack or what's behind it. WordPress already runs 30% of all e-commerce sites on the web with what it has, what benefit using react in the frontend of your new e-commerce store will bring you? When asked, they say that its 'more modern'. Doing something complicated and flipping backwards to do the same thing that WP already does out of the box with a plugin like Woocommerce to do it 'more modern', which the customers who buy stuff on the site will abso-freaking-lutely wont notice or care about.
This feels like an additional proof of how the influx of unbounded investor and VC cash enabled by a bloated stock market riding on zero-interest economy caused mainstream tech to become complex for complexity's sake - organizations became more like grad schools that do research than actual companies that serve end users, ending up creating a developer culture that does things in the most complex way possible without a justifying business reason.
WordPress got into 'this' state because the modern frontend is in 'this' state itself.
For a decade now people kept criticizing WordPress for 'not being modern' and pushed all the ills that the modern frontend is afflicted with onto the project. They eventually caved in and added some 'modernity' to the project.
But not after ~4 years later, the zero-interest economy ends, stock values plummet, VC money dries up and organizations and people start looking for efficiency in their stacks to cut development and cloud costs, and voila - server-side rendering is cool again, serving static pages or plain HTML to the users is better and it turns out that our frontend stack has become unnecessarily complicated and not every app or site needed total DOM manipulation capabilities.
But the damage was done - React made its way into WP which already had well-fleshed-out, long-existing code and systems that were fulfilling all the purposes it and its users needed and complicated everything.
It feels like this is happening because mainstream tech is adopting WordPress more and bringing its biases and preferences to its community:
I see people asking about how they can rip off the WordPress frontend and use it as a 'headless cms' with a react or another complicated frontend that they absolutely don't need to use for the purpose they intend to build their site or app: Ie you're just making a custom e-commerce site. You arent going to pitch to VCs who may care about this kind of stuff, you are going to sell to actual end users who don't give a crap about your stack or what's behind it. WordPress already runs 30% of all e-commerce sites on the web with what it has, what benefit using react in the frontend of your new e-commerce store will bring you? When asked, they say that its 'more modern'. Doing something complicated and flipping backwards to do the same thing that WP already does out of the box with a plugin like Woocommerce to do it 'more modern', which the customers who buy stuff on the site will abso-freaking-lutely wont notice or care about.
This feels like an additional proof of how the influx of unbounded investor and VC cash enabled by a bloated stock market riding on zero-interest economy caused mainstream tech to become complex for complexity's sake - organizations became more like grad schools that do research than actual companies that serve end users, ending up creating a developer culture that does things in the most complex way possible without a justifying business reason.