Why are front end developers (esp React) in such high demand in 2022?

There are 3 aspects in my opinion:

1- Companies understanding that a good user-interface is a must for their product. HN crowd are known for being anti-JavaScript, but modern web-apps are incredibly powerful and useful. This means you can't make your back-end developer glue together a JSP and call it a day anymore. So front-end overall is in high demand.

2- React helped standardize the way we do front-end. Yes Svelt, Vue and Solid are all great. But the ecosystem and the ability to hire from a large pool of talent without needing to train developers on your niche stack is a huge benefit.

3- React is easy to start, hard to master. When interviewing you'll likely be seeing a 10:1 ratio of boot-camp grads vs developers who have dealt with complex React apps at scale. This means an experienced React developer can ask for a higher salary.

I would say that Frontend development in general (HTML+CSS) and the whole javascript ecosystem are a nightmare of patches on top of other patches, and endless exceptions and small components whose sole job is to plug some hole from a different technology under it. You need endless people and bruteforce to build on it and provide more value for the end user.

In comparison, Backend can turn bad sometimes, but a well designed, small Backend component can produce endless value and easy extensibility. I've never seen anything similar in Frontend.

I think the vast majority of websites and apps are not "technically complex". The backend is generally close to a CRUD with a small amount of "special sauce". This makes UX the defining feature for most projects. This means that for the "average" company you will need more frontend than backend developers. React is by far the most popular frontend framework right now and provides a valuable lingua franca which provides a large talent pool.

More experienced devs are burning out and signing off from this crazy town. People after bootcamps trying to enter the market and making this carousel to spin even faster. Companies are looking specifically for Angular/React developers.

A lot of organizations bet the farm on React ~5 years ago because it was the cool new thing. It is very likely that many of the original developers have since moved on to the next cool new thing, and now companies need maintenance work done on their (now unwieldy) codebase.

Another reason: The trend today seems to be to offload most of the data processing to the client side, only using the server as a glorified database pipe. Naturally, this results in a higher demand for frontend development.

This isn't unique to frontend or React. All developers are in high demand, and have been for over a decade.

But how it concluded that front end developers (esp React) are in high demand, any facts/data please?

Building UI is labor intensive. It involves a lot of functionality: the layout and display style of elements, binding those elements to data inputs and data display, and has to manage sending and receiving data from the server as well as possibly updating the “page” and it’s element’s outside of a page load cycle.

Unfortunately for the way we use the web, the frontend is not simply some two-way bound GUI, but is rather a remote folder browsing application that explicitly was initially designed with the page-load (or reload) as the only explicit mechanism for synchronization of state between the client and the server.

Everyone does React because everyone else does React.

One company built an SPA in React, even though they have a handful of internal users and the app runs inside the corporate network.

There is an ultrahigh velocity of software rot in the FE/JS ecosystem.

Imagine Facebook releasing a next big WebAssembly+Rust-based framework, and now everyone will be either stuck with React, or will need to rewrite.

The market chooses the path to inflict the maximum damage/loss.

The same thing that happened when we got flash the 1st time.. account/project managers see thing can move so they they make everything move...

i think the high demand is more for full stack "react/typescript/nextjs/graphql...." developers with experience building real world high scale apps.

Wait, where are those jobs? Are we in a recession or not?

Memory is cheap.