Exactly. I remember the times when webmail clients were SSR applications. Roundcube and Gmail were game changers. Webmail finally felt smooth and usable.
Web shops are somewhere in the middle, they need a little bit of interactivity for the cart, especially if the user opens multiple tabs.
I was a JavaScript developer for about 15 years and I moved onto something else because most of the people doing the work can't program. Not at all. I got tired of being held hostage by people who couldn't function without more help than they needed.
I also get tired of the arguments from ignorance. The you don't know how hard life is type of bullshit arguments. I do know because I have done this work, probably much longer than you, and its not as challenging as you are claiming.
Add to it dev churn each 6 months one dev leaves an new joins full of fresh new ideas how to jquery. In the meantime also 2 freelancers adding their stuff.
Another person mixing up web apps with web sites.
We do need frameworks for web apps. Yes people were wrongly making websites using frameworks.
But I am busy building web apps and without frameworks it is not feasible to build one.