I've taught multiple web dev boot camp courses. All of them are passionate about teaching the web dev stack starting from the front end and working their way to the back end. The consistent reasoning I'm told is because instructors want students to be productive quicker. It makes sense from an engagement standpoint at the beginning of a class.
We introduce students to the web by having them build more and more complex UIs.
The flow I've seen at most boot camps is:
HTML>CSS>JS DOM>React>NodeJS>Devops
This feels like a big context change. Devs are able to build pretty great looking websites with just HTML/CSS. I find many students who join web dev boot camps aren't clear on programming fundamentals. So, turning code into UI is an extra large leap. However, I believe it makes more sense to begin with data and then add UI to it. I believe problems that scale in complexity for web devs are not HTML/CSS but are JS problems. I'm not trying to discount HTML/CSS but I don't believe the concepts behind scaleable HTML/CSS are complex for Juniors. I've never considered failing a student because of their lack of HTML/CSS knowledge. I have failed students because they couldn't learn how to write loops and conditionals.
However, I propose:
JS DOM>HTML>CSS>NodeJS>React>Devops
The reason for my proposal is that it is the most iterative of approaches for web devs. This path comes at the cost of up front visual productivity. You don't really understand how to build web-ui's for quite a bit. But, I'll say that with this approach the switch from UI programming to backend programming is much more seamless as it puts learning at the center of the process as opposed to productivity. That shift from productivity to learning code is huge and maintaining a path of iterative improvement in my opinion is best.
I've outlined my thoughts on why Frontend engineering is an extremely complex field and possibly will elucidate some more of my thoughts on why I think many frontend curriculums treat backend concerns as second class.
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