I still find front end JavaScript development to be a chore, the least appealing part of any project idea, despite actually liking Working with HTML and CSS… it’s not even really JavaScript as a language.<p>It’s the ecosystem I don’t like. I read about “opinionated frameworks” and for a backend framework that tends to be something like Django or Rails, frameworks built to give you everything top to bottom, with clear layering and extension points. However for front end frameworks opinionated seems to mean “has more indecipherable lisp/scheme function/macro style logic” that does what the original author designed it for wonderfully but is a royal pain to extend, modify or really build off in any way other than just forking it.<p>I’d call this a “framework for sites where SEO is critical” not really an “opinionated framework” it’s more of a “single issue framework” to borrow a political term”<p>The only “opinionated framework” I’ve ever used in the front end/JavaScript world that felt like a cohesive, truly opinionated framework in the backend Django/Rails kinda way is EmberJS. Which I highly recommend to people who hate the whole JavaScript ecosystem churn. About the only negative I can highlight was poor IDE tooling with older versions which the most recent releases have improved on their end, but is for the most part an issue of IDE developers like JetBrains not considering EmberJS as important as the Angular family and the React, Vue, and other JSX based system family. Which I can understand for the most part due to business realities, but also this is hardly a good reason not to try something when the tools have full auto-reload and progressive compilation to efficiently test things in the browser as you make changes in any text editor you like.