It's still development... what people were doing before was hacking crap together. Now it's much more a line of development. I just don't like using the term Software Engineering, when you aren't applying Engineering as a Discipline. You *CAN* write software as an Engineering discipline. However, unless you are working on (air/space)craft, other vehicles, weapon systems and/or medical equipment, it's probably a waste of resources to do so.
This isn't to say that front end development today with the component systems we have isn't significantly better than what came before, there have been component library based systems of development for the front end for two decades. This isn't exactly a new approach, only relatively new tech.
I think the title would have been better as, "Front-End Development Is Dead. Long Live Front-End Development!"
Kind of irked by the shallow comparison and expanded my own.
https://medium.com/@tracker1/native-app-development-options-response-c6df6178612?source=friends_link&sk=046780655bf23fe5804ce97fa85eb596
Considering React was often paired with Backbone earlier on, I definitely wouldn't put the learning difficulty up with Angular. Now, Flux/Redux or GraphQL are often used for state management and they can be difficult to learn, but imho still not nearly as difficult as Angular.