Cliche rant coming up: as a backend engineer, recently started working on frontend. Is this how yall do things? Everything so far feels less mature, thinly pieced together, barely holding up, fast moving, unnecessarily bloated, and no care for longevity, robustness and discipline. Seems like every thing is on Youtube, no real good books (yeah, go ahead and search for "React JS" books on Amazon and see if you find something solid that is well praised). It's these 8 hour fucking Youtube videos that I need to watch and probably not remember anything. I watched one of those and its horrifying what kind of stuff these people are teaching. I am obviously generalizing, sure there are some really smart people involved in Frontend tech, but boy if you take a sweeping look from ten thousand feet, it ain't pretty.
Well, first reaction for most people would be I am offended by this. But, I am speaking from the heart. This is exactly how I bloody feel, change my mind. The entire frontend ecosystem including browsers and the horrible mess that html/css/js is needs to be redone properly from scratch. Unfortunately, we can't because we've dug ourselves deep into this hole. How do we get out of this?
/rant
I admit I feel I share some of your frustrations. In the past I have written production frontends in Angular and experimented with Vue and React. Out of all of them I found React to be the most enjoyable, but even then I still struggled with project setup and found the tooling confusing. I even quite like TS as a language, but I feel it's still quite limited by the fact it transpiles to JS.
Recently, I discovered yew [0]. It is a Rust framework for building frontends using wasm. I really appreciate the robustness that Rust brings such as ownership checks and ADTs. I don't think it's for everyone, but it may be worth looking at if you perhaps find modern frontend development confusing frustrating. I've found it to be quite the breath of fresh air.
If you do decide to have a look I found the examples [1] and getting started guide [2] very informative.
[0] https://github.com/yewstack/yew