There's no one solution. The kind of solution you're talking about is great for many purposes, maybe the majority, and it's kind of a shame so many sites and apps went to heavy JS, SPA type frameworks. But on the other hand, a true app like Google Spreadsheets would be completely insane to implement in jQuery.
It all goes back to the release of Gmail in 2004. It changed the web forever. Since then if your frontend isn't "dynamic" or AJAX-y, it feels "old" or only for engineers.
Hibiki is a reaction to the crazy amount of scaffolding and specific knowledge that is now required to make frontend apps! I had good engineers on my team that all know HTML and can write tables, forms, buttons, etc. but they don't know JS. It was such a PITA to hook them up with a frontend engineer to write a React app to make their frontend look pretty (so the non-technical folks could use their tools). Days were lost in the process. Hibiki is my solution to this problem. A simple framework that doesn't require in-depth JS knowledge but (with the right libraries) can get you good looking credible apps.
Scaffolding is crazy too. I can write a one file python script to output a heredoc with HTML to render some output data. To make that a 'modern' app with create-react-app I'd have to add a whole repository of files and tooling. Hibiki can get you most of what you want right inline.
