I think the reason experienced devs tend to have minimalist websites that look like they are from the 90s, is because software devs aren’t UX experts.

At a senior level at large companies, someone else designs the look and figmas to make the site be pretty. I don’t do that shit.

I can do some basic stuff as a front end dev, but react has nothing to do with css animations and all the stuff you typically associate with a “pretty” website.

Reactive frameworks are just handy for updating the dom on a mutatable website (ie forms, web socket stuff, data in out, pulling data from a db)

Blogs tend to be statically generated so there should be zero reason to use reactive frameworks anyways, unless you add something dynamic like perhaps a comment box folks can login to and leave comments/likes/shares etc. Loading those comments will prolly want a framework.

Aside from that, it’s mostly css to do fancy stuff.