On the web, there's semantic HTML and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines which focus on making content for the Internet as broadly interoperable and accessible as possible. The former from a technical point of view, the latter from a human interaction point of view. They go together hand on hand.

At the rate frontend spits frameworks and languages it's pointless to write papers for it. Innovation on that field happens by bruteforce.

Maybe Elm? It was the result of Evan Czaplicki's thesis.

Have you looked at Elm?

It's very much not JavaScript, but I think that comes with the territory of wanting something significantly different.

For what it's worth, with wasm you could use any language that compiles to it as a frontend language. Rust has a few frameworks that can compile to standalone wasm web pages.

htmx.org has tons of assays posted online. But I don't recall seeing any 'white paper' for frontend frameworks... maybe it's also related to "ux research" (if there's such thing) being more of a marketing discipline, and by its profit-seeking nature that's mostly secretive.

Concepts like Reactive programming are widely used in web/UI contexts. The problem of connecting a UI to an underlying data set is not trivial. Several frameworks deal with this.

As was already said, concerns like Accessibility are studied academically. They have more to do with user experience than the technology, so not sure if they match your question.