sprinkling event handlers all over and doing DOM manipulations and trying to pile jQuery plugins on other plugins ... that was the anti-pattern
saying nah, fuck this, let's just do a rerender is what happened, and going back to doing it on server-side is one way, but doing it on client-side is the "React way"
I don't know how old are you but I distinctly remember how big of a hard on everyone had for Angular and then React and virtualdom. React actually brought some good things in how you engineered your frontend code. This thing goes back on that completely and forces you to mix and match your frontend code on both the frontend and the backend. I genuinely don't understand how one could seriously consider this for a large application.
I started with FrontPage '98, and copy-pasted DHTML into the source code soup to have falling snow on my homepage for the winter.
I have also no idea why people love template spaghetti! But of course it can work, and simply setting the bar lower might actually help projects against feature creep.
saying nah, fuck this, let's just do a rerender is what happened, and going back to doing it on server-side is one way, but doing it on client-side is the "React way"