Neo just means new. It's not an out-of-jail card if it is completely unrelated to the old/real thing.
replyNeo doesn't mean it can just be a completely different thing, it means its a modern take on the same thing from before but slightly evolved. Neo-Classicism still looks like Classicism. Neo Nazis are still Nazis.
replyIf I create something called Neo-Cuisine, you'd expect the result to be edible. If I see something calling itself "Neo-Brutalist Architecture", I'd expect it to look like Brutalism, or have some hallmark of the style. e.g. raw, but a different material new to the time period).
As far as web design, there's nothing "raw" about 100s of dependencies and animated charts and rounded rects and opinionated fonts and the rest of the this pastiche in "64 components, charts and star shapes for React and Tailwind v4. Built on shadcn/ui and Base UI." This is just Corporate Memphis + dialog aesthetics[0]
It's a visual style, yet all your criticisms are about under-the-hood technicalities. The style I use for my personal projects (https://frost-e.com/design-system/) is a single css file, but looks similar. Nothing is stopping you from applying this visual style to plain HTML components.
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