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I think most of the problems are ecosystem/people issues–in turn driving the language/framework problems.

Selected short gripes on people (any one of which I could write volumes on):

• Conflating standard library problems with language problems. ES5 was actually a pretty reasonable language–the problem came from having a standard lib so anemic (to this day!) that people feel the need to keep adding stuff. If TC39/W3C spent less time getting high on their own supply and more time fixing the standard library then so much of what I hate goes away.
• Permanent neophilia and just an overwhelming lack of restraint and good taste. Nobody seems to acknowledge the costs to chasing new shiny.
• Everybody uses solutions backed by Big Players without regard for whether it’s a good idea or not. Your blog doesn’t need React. Your E-commerce site probably doesn’t need Cognito. Staaaaaahp.
• Everything has so many dependencies and this nests. Left-pad should’ve been a wake-up call, and yet apparently nobody is actually serious about fixing that.
• Tooling is too complicated and takes too long to run. Why is setting up Webpack annoying? What is it hard to just run off a config off the top of one’s head?
• Testing culture seems to have gone super far into unit testing and just really sucks for actual can-the-user-do-the-thing-that-makes-us-money testing. It should be easier to script UAT than to do the DI and other stuff around unit testing, but for some reason that’s not where we evolved.
• Too much popularity-driven development. We could be forgiven for assuming that most technical decisions being made in Webland are the result of conference talks and Big Personalities posting online.

Selected language gripes:

• ES6+ is getting past what comfortably fits in a person’s head.
• CSS really needs to just have nested scoping already.

Select framework gripes:

• React has made dumb decisions and devs won’t back down on them. className, full stop.
• ThreeJS keeps carving out key stuff–say, orbit cameras–into the examples instead of core, keeps adding other shit into core, and somehow bungles packaging the ‘extras’ into friendly NPM modules. At least this was the case last winter when I ran into it, again.
• D3 is super easy to make slow and awful, and just always looks like spaghetti code to me.
• There is no good framework to do some of the Java computational geometry stuff we did two decades ago. This is likely because making a holey concave polygon from other smaller holey concave polygons and triangulating it is _Real People Hard _but making another vdom knockoff is Frontend Engineer Hard.

I could go on, but why close the year on a negative note?