I would say things are improving. Through WASM we are now getting more languages running in the browser. They are starting to bring alternative frameworks and ways of doing things to the table as well. Instead of this frontend / backend notion, we should start thinking again about the notion of networked applications; like we used to do before the web became a thing.
Inevitably you want some computation to be close to the source data (for efficiency) and some other computation to be close to the point of interaction (for responsiveness). It's not an either / or proposition. You can do both. And phones and browsers can do a lot locally these days. So there's no need to pretend that it is still 1999 in terms of browser capabilities. They can do so much more now.
Instead of AJAX, we now have companies like Tailscale doing all sorts of funky networking stuff in a browser. Likewise, people are running entire 3D games, photo and video editing tools, or design tools like figma, etc. in a browser. All enabled by WASM. Most of that stuff does not involve a whole lot of css, javascript, or html. That stuff is increasingly optional. Browser application development and desktop application development are finally merging after being considered completely separate things for more than 2 decades. It's all just application development. It may or may not involve talking to servers via a network. You don't have to limit yourself to HTTP when doing that.
Inevitably you want some computation to be close to the source data (for efficiency) and some other computation to be close to the point of interaction (for responsiveness). It's not an either / or proposition. You can do both. And phones and browsers can do a lot locally these days. So there's no need to pretend that it is still 1999 in terms of browser capabilities. They can do so much more now.
Instead of AJAX, we now have companies like Tailscale doing all sorts of funky networking stuff in a browser. Likewise, people are running entire 3D games, photo and video editing tools, or design tools like figma, etc. in a browser. All enabled by WASM. Most of that stuff does not involve a whole lot of css, javascript, or html. That stuff is increasingly optional. Browser application development and desktop application development are finally merging after being considered completely separate things for more than 2 decades. It's all just application development. It may or may not involve talking to servers via a network. You don't have to limit yourself to HTTP when doing that.