I’m familiar with them yes, and they have certain issues that IMHO makes it even harder to work with. Why? Your server side code usually ends up bearing zero resemblance to what’s deployed, making debugging harder.

In some ways it’s more flawed than the use client-side… particularly when to be frank if all you’re doing is outputting HTML in a logical order it fails to provide anything that simply writing out backtick strings can’t…. unless you’re wasting time with some sort of garbage programming model that fails to match the task complexity (like how people shoe-horn MVC into PHP where it doesn’t fit) or try to make event / promise driven things that need neither events or promises, I fail to see what it provides that functions with template strings with the http object or console.log to stdout fails to provide.

To paraphrase Manfred Albrecht von Richthofen: parse the request, process the data, output the result. Anything else is rubbish.

… and that’s where it seems most of how people code their responses to HTTP requests seem to be making things as hard as humanly possible. They draw the lines of separation in all the wrong places, try to force outdated irrelevant 1960’s theoretical programming models in where they don’t fit, and with their HTML/CSS practices so far up 1997’s rectum they got to say hi to Lemmiwinks on the way by.

Abstraction for abstraction sake is not improvement. Especially when the resultant methodology is many, MANY times more complex than just using vanilla code.