I am also not really into web development, but from the outside it seems especially primitive. I did write some Qt applications the last ~10-15 years and even at the turn of the century it was far easier: design graphically using Qt designer, run the UI file through uic, connect some signals to slots, done. All fast, smooth, with a much more native look & feel than web apps.

I recently ported a larger Qt 4 application to Qt 5. It took one or two hours. (Qt 4 was introduced in 2005.)

> Front-end programming was boring then and it's boring now.

Not if you care about performance (to name one tricky aspect). It's all too easy to write a slow app.

no it's not. it's very hard to write a slow application if you know the minimum about how the browser/vm handles your data.

very few cases excluded (e.g. scrolling issues on Android of old) it's nothing but a case of bad developers not having a clue. their code will be slow regardless of the framework because they use the wrong data structure, or render on the wrong step. simple as that.

then changing framework means dropping several features until they are ported, which means less code, which means faster code... until all features are back in. then, rinse, apply framework du jour, repeat.

I second this. Performant code is not so opaque as to be super hard, people simply need to know their shit.

It reaches much more people if that is what you care about.