Choosing the Stack

Let's imagine reducing the stack to the minimum. Let's create manually HTML, each page, one by one. Let's get back to the origin of websites development. What would happen?

At first, we should experience extremely high performance in terms of response. Then we might have fewer technical issues: no more database or server-side languages.

On the other hand, it would be very difficult to handle huge volumes of content, with a tedious procedure to update the website. Almost impossible to collaborate on both the making of the website and the updating.

With these drawbacks, developers and who are in charge of updates need a Content Management System, and when we need a CMS we need a database and we need a server-side script to read and write on the database: we need a more complex stack.

For a couple of decades, we attended the rise and fall of different CMS (open or closed source), differents versions of server-side's script, always with the goal to increase performances, for the quality of connection before or for the quality of mobile's connection after, or to achieve a better user experience.

The result of this sort of upgrade was to generate a strong coupling between the frontend and backend. The server-side language was often included in the frontend (.NET, PHP, JAVA, and a few more).
Choosing the stack was often choosing the server-side language and the database type and then Javascript was just the DOM handling script in the front-end.

With the increasing popularity of Javascript and all the related frameworks (React, Angular, Vue, and many more), we have seen backend and frontend splitting from each other, divorce in a way, and just talking each other through web-APIs.
Right now developers go for the backend stack and the front-end stack as separate solutions. In which technology the endpoints have to be created on the backend. In which javascript framework will data be handled. Which I think is a good way to go.

But in the end, the need to get the job done and have control of processes for maintenance made the frameworks so important. Bootstrap, Foundation, React, Vue, Kotlin became so relevant that nowadays is no more the developers choosing the stack but the stack choosing the developers.

The popularity of a framework in the specific moment when the project start is much more relevant than the personas or architecture of content, at the point that sometimes developers do not realize they do not need a full framework just to achieve a hamburger menu functionality.