[p0peax]

I think the tooling on front-end vs. backend has something to do with the end of the pipeline. Backend systems can be developed using multiple languages and frameworks that will ultimately run on only one platform. Front-end can be developed with multiple languages, but will ultimately be transpiled to JavaScript and rendered as HTML/CSS. Front-end has to accommodate multiple platforms and browsers.

To me it also feels like the "modern" tooling for front-end is created for front-end developers by backend-developers.