And it only gets more complicated.

The entire IT world is just a huge ball of complexity. Partly because the actual (domain/business) problem is simply hard, sometimes because you have to deal with legacy systems, partly because you have to deal with difficult people.

As developer (and especially backend) our job is to coax or coerce this bundle of sorrow to do what we want it to do and hide as much duct tape as possible. Frontend then has to make that crap presentable and usable.

The reality is, 90% of my work is not writing code, but all the stuff around it. I spent several hours in meetings to coordinate, how to split a long string into three. I'm not exaggerating. But there's just 5 different consumers of this data and three different sources and you have to find a way to make all eight parties happy.