It was solved with Silverlight - declarative UIs in XAML. No CSS. Strongly typed C#. The downside was you needed to install the plugin.
So there are better ways than HTML/CSS/JS but we're stuck with them, because they are browser-native. WASM might rescue us!
I've at least managed to almost completely get rid of JS/SPA framework madness in the browser by going back to server rendered pages (adding reactivity where needed with datastar signals). Datastar is a breath of fresh air and might just make all SPA frameworks obsolete (just as they in turn killed jQuery).