HN likes to downplay frameworks like React, Vue, etc., but people who work on modern web apps everyday know how insanely difficult/unmaintainable it is to write the same thing in plain JavaScript. And before you start saying "but I can build a simple HTML site and sprinkle with some JavaScript", the market has spoken – general web users like high fidelity web apps.
Whether you like inaccessible websites when you disable JavaScript is one thing, but don't dismiss useful tools that don't suit to your tastes. If you don't need to build a web app nobody's forcing you to.
HN likes to downplay frameworks like React, Vue, etc., but people who work on modern web apps everyday
Whenever I read the word 'modern' in this context now, I know the writer means javascript, and in particular one of the 'modern' javascript frameworks. I'm not sure quite how or when it acquired that meaning, but it seems to be used that way on HN frequently. I wonder how this word came to mean built with Javascript to some people? Do you genuinely see modern as synonymous with built in React, Vue, etc. or would you allow other approaches into the modern canon?
The similarities with the burn the old world then rebuild it anew attitude of early 20c Modernism are striking, so I suppose it fits, but it should not be used in the place of built with javascript, as the implication is nothing else is truly Modern.
Also what does high fidelity mean in the context of websites? Is this like high fidelity vinyl records with a warm sound? Do your frameworks have gold cables?
I think you'll find people here casting doubt on the requirement for web frameworks because there are many other ways of building websites (server side for example, the way this website you're using right now is built), there is no one 'modern' way. People build contemporary websites with a variety of tools, Javascript is not objectively better than other solutions IMO (in many ways it is obviously worse), and client side is not obviously better than server side, it's a pattern which has seen its popularity wax and wane and will do so again.
GP is not talking about JS frameworks, though. They're talking about layout constraint systems (the argument goes that CSS is harder to reason about because "width" might not mean physical width, since it could affected by margin, etc). The counter-argument, of course, is that there are many more types of devices now (e.g. using "desktop" experiences in an ipad, multiple screen resolutions, etc just to give a few counter-arguments to the notion that desktop is "simple")
As for frameworks: the market has indeed spoken, but not in the way you think. Consumers of websites rarely pay for the majority of websites they use. Employers, however, pay developers and the buzzword-chasing in resume building/interviewing cycles is real.
Whether you like inaccessible websites when you disable JavaScript is one thing, but don't dismiss useful tools that don't suit to your tastes. If you don't need to build a web app nobody's forcing you to.