A succinct way I’ve framed the split is that a front-of-the-front-end developer determines the look and feel of a button, while a back-of-the-front-end developer determines what happens when that button is clicked.
Doing it right requires a different pace of working and a much broader thought process than “ok, let’s get this thing out the door.” Which is super tough because most workplaces place a huge emphasis on getting things out the door, and fast. Little agile tickets that are expected to be completed in micro sprints to me seem to be antithetical to doing it right.
One thing I've been enjoying about working as a technical writer is that the minute-by-minute texture of the work feels right. Something about formatting text, faffing about with SVGs, trying to rewrite a sentence more clearly... it's just enjoyable in itself, and I feel at home with it.
...Working as a programmer was very much not like that. There's something in the rough vicinity of professional dev work that I do like, which I could probably label as 'iterative hobbyist tinkering with websites'. I like working on something with a strong visual component, and I like to be inside of a fast feedback loop, and I'm mostly interested in just somehow bodging through until it works. I'm not very interested in either the computer-sciencey side of programming — data structures, algorithms — or the software-engineerey side of making things run reliably at scale in a maintainable way. So maybe it's not surprising that the minute-by-minute texture of professional programming was just... kind of bad. Occasional fun bits when I got into something, but the background experience was not fun.