Or are trying to follow fads so they're more employable (resume-driven development?) Which is a strategy I am not criticizing in the slightest. It can suck when it means the whole team has to learn the fad framework, though.
This is definitely a thing. Lots of tech choices are made for that reason, not just front end frameworks, as I'm sure you know. But there's no incentive to put one's foot down and declare that the emperor, indeed, has no clothes, so we keep praising his fashion sense and taking home our pay. This is true for developers at all levels, project managers, CTOs, and so on. Every one of them becomes more employable—easier to find the next job, next job's higher-paying—for having lead or been a member of a team using inappropriate or sub-optimal but trendy or "serious" tools. "No one got fired for choosing..." has extended to a ton of trendy crap, a fair bit of it half-baked, and you're not only safer but also better off financially than if you risk suggesting anything else, even if "standard" solutions slow down development, require more and more expensive people (that's the point, you want to be one of those!), and make your systems more fragile.
Maybe! But also, as a user, I expect to do more and more in my browser.
I would find it strange, and probably switch to a competitor, if my preferred airline for example made me install (and keep updated) a desktop app in order to book a flight.
You know one thing I expect my browser to do that it has a hard time doing these days? Efficiently and correctly displaying text documents.
It has a hard time doing this because so many web pages think they need to be web apps and overthink things instead of leveraging the tools at their disposal in the browser.
Yes, if you're building a new Outlook or Google Maps in the browser it ought to be a web app.
If you're building the remaining 90% of use cases it should probably just be a web page with boring old tech. Add JS for spice if you'd like.
