I mean webpack is slow, and css can be annoying sure, but c'mon, 2 days? I'm having trouble seeing that take two days unless you're doing a lot more than a form with two text input boxes and a button for signup and one for login in the modern version, which would make it an apples to oranges comparison.
2 days is fast. OP left out that most companies nowadays run a separate front end team, so now you need your backend team and front end team to have a meeting about what proper JSON should be returned, then the front end mocks that response and implements the form behavior, all the while the backend implements server functionality, then someone else (usually) tests this integration, then someone else deploys it. If nothing in that multi-team communication pipeline breaks you’re very lucky.
If you can all get that done in 2 days you’re running a very fast dev team. Minus the QA and DevOps team my point is that a SPA/JavaScript-heavy web app is not only a technological choice but an organizational one. Things used to be faster because there were fewer divisions in the software, therefore fewer divisions in the organization.
Expectations have also changed in various ways since "the simple days" when devs were the product managers, the implementors and testers all in one. Some things are better now, some things are worse.
I used to be able to churn out a form, naively, in two hours because I could just implement the elements, inline style them, give them a name and then go implement the backend form handler. Now there's a checklist of requirements: does it implement our design system, does it have test id attributes, is it responsive, does it work with password managers and auto populating form fillers, does it support internationalization, does it support multiple languages correctly, does it provide client side data validation, does the server return errors correctly and how should they be displayed, does it have rendering tests, does it have end to end tests, and so on and on and on.
Most of this isn't needed for a personal project or proof of concept but for a reliable product that millions of people use globally, a lot of it is table stakes or legal liability. You can certainly do it server side too, but the two hour effort window is still gone.
It's not just 2 input boxes, unfortunately. It's also a backend part, adding sessions, requiring the user to be signed in. It is also sign out functionality.
In MVC framework, you just annotate a bunch of controllers, import Sign In and Sign Out functionality, and you are all set.
Another examples might be building data grids, CRUD functionalities, or more complex validation situations. Back then, you designed database, generated CRUDs, it automatically added Bootstrap CSS compatible classes. You added one beforeSave handlers to add extra logic, and it was done.
We web developers had to be competitive, because our competition were people using tools like Delphi, where you could drag'n'drop 30 screens in a day. It was ugly (default Windows 98 WinAPI look), it wasn't responsive, it wasn't prepared for people with disabilities, but it was hyperproductive.
