Interesting comments section. Lots of ideas here. I’ve been in the software industry for 15 years (17 if you count my internship). Here’s my perspective:

What I’ve observed over time is frameworks and libraries becoming more widely and extensively used, and web performance going down (I won’t comment on security, that matter is way more complex than simply using or not using a framework). The web pages and apps I interact with today seem to be more sluggish and less responsive in general, and consume more RAM, than how I seem to remember the web working only 10 years ago. The only reason this has been sustainable is due to the evolution of hardware, but I shouldn’t need more hardware just to run a modern web app and web browser. If it was truly better, it seems to me this should still run fine on an average laptop from 2012.

Regarding the complexity frameworks bring, this is also especially true of JavaScript. I left JavaScript completely in 2016 and devoted myself fully to the backend because of all of the confusion and reinventing the wheel going on in JavaScript. I had the interest to be competent in both the front and back ends, but the craziness of the JavaScript community and ecosystem motivated me to make a choice since I wanted to have a life outside engineering. Since in general things move a bit more slowly and thoughtfully on the back end, especially in the strongly typed compiled languages (C, C++, Java, Scala, Haskell,…) I focused there because my priority is writing good software, not following the hype and trying to stay ahead of the latest trends to impress some employer who drank the cool-aid. If the problem is bad enough to keep a highly motivated engineer like me away from the front end entirely, it’s a problem indeed. This problem exists on the backend to some extent, but JavaScript is way crazier than anything else by far.

This all being said, some frameworks in some use cases _do_ make things simpler and easier. But you must do an honest assessment and choose wisely. In general, there’s seldom even a discussion on an engineering team about whether to use a framework and if so which one. Most often, some authority, be it senior engineers/architects or corporate management/leadership, has made the decision before the project was even defined and its problems well known.

I sympathize with this post. But I don’t think we need to nix all JavaScript frameworks and that will solve the problem. I think as a community engineers should pick a small subset of frameworks to continue supporting according to their different strengths and the problems they try to solve, and then once the best most useful ones are agreed upon, the community should focus on perfecting them - stabilize the APIs for the long haul, maximize the performance, and minimize the resource usage. The community spreads itself too thin, there’s too many big egos trying to create the next best framework, and it’s exhausting for everybody who wants their energy to go into engineering instead of keeping up with the hype.