[kavaruka]

I think this is just nostalgia, in the past decade I worked on several web apps, with lot of interactions and real time data (online auctions, live sport scores, customer support) and using jQuery (or even Angular.js) for this purpose was awful, because you had to reinvent state management and think about rendering performance.

You don’t understand the tools we have now, probably you are not the target and you can still use PHP + jQuery.

And is false that they weren’t package managers: the de-facto standard was Bower, used in combo with Grunt as task manager, with a Ruby toolchain that included LESS most of the type to preprocess styles.