I signed up to this instance because I feel this in my bones.
I cut my teeth on PHP CGI in the late 00's before shifting to python CGI because my university had banned PHP on the webservers.
Frontend wasn't exactly a term back then. I'd picked up a bit of jquery into my server generated Django templates, I was playing with template fragments in 2011 and life was good.
I mostly avoided the SPA fad, but a (short) stint at Wayfair had me end up writing react and dear God the amount of indirection and tomfoolery involved with effectively writing the app a second time left a sour taste in my mouth.
These days I mostly write embedded daemons in rust for Linux devices. I wrote a munin replacement in rust because packaging perl for Yocto is a struggle. I needed to serve a website, so I found a jinja style library, setup my templates and fragments and dropped htmx into the frontend.
Life is good again.
I have friends/coworkers who argue with me that I should write SPAs but they don't get that I mostly want to avoid fighting frontend tooling and get shit done. A backend serving templates is miles more ergo than react and I don't have to deal with the NPM upgrade treadmill. I don't get daily dependabot alerts.
Don't get me started on golang, meteorjs, and lambdas
Sometimes I flip that cheese over and let it crisp up after steaming it