Is front-end web development dying?

[KevinM1]

I test web apps for the living. I see plenty of common things, like jQuery and Bootstrap (to an extent), but none of the sites I test could be created in Wix or whatever crap GoDaddy produced. The thing about the front-end is that is has to talk to the back-end. No sensible company is going to design a front-end in Wix and then somehow try to jerry-rig it to their back-end servers.

You summarized in 2 lines what I rambled on about for half a page.

I've actually tried to do this in the past-- use a designer to put together a site, and then add my own bells and whistles.

The problem was that the designed code was a freaking nightmare-- meaningless .css class names, stupid amounts of unnecessary in-line style declarations, and so on.  All the postbacks were wired, so that I couldn't add new buttons that posted and did anything on the server side without screwing up the entire navigation system.  In the end, it literally took me less time to learn how to properly set up my style sheets and so on than it would have taken me just to fix the shit that auto-designers spew out.

This was me in the early-to-mid 2000s.  I was hired by a somewhat local non-profit to help with their website.  The original version was done by some elderly guy in Microsoft Frontpage.  He didn't even bother to keep certain elements that appeared on most of the pages the same size on each page.  He just lazily eyeballed it.  The entire site was yellow and pink.

The code generated by Frontpage was an embarrassment.  Everything was inline.  A ton of superfluous nested elements.  For the 1st part of the rebuild, I took a hatchet to the code just to cut down on file sizes so when I went back in to reorganize things and make them look better, I wouldn't have to go through a bunch of tangled shit.  Every page had at least a 25% reduction in code.  Most were 35%-50%.  Some were 60%+ (Frontpage couldn't do tables right).  Same ugly ass looking site, but much smaller footprint.  

From there, I salvaged what I could of the smaller pages.  I rewrote the more complicated ones from scratch.  If I was doing it again today, I simply would've nuked the first version and rebuild the entire thing, but I was young and dumb.