> the complexity in front end web development and the development costs that come from it are a real issue and shouldn't be dismissed
I would argue that it's an absurdly overblown issue. The "costs" are a clear net gain which is why these tools are all but ubiquitous. Developer hype only goes so far, these tools are a proven success across every major tech company with a front-end presence. All this supposed complexity is a holistic improvement over the past, especially because all the same libraries and techniques from 20 years ago and everything in between work exactly the same way today.
> Anyone who's had to maintain one of these projects long term without a massive team or inherited an older codebase understands that there are serious churn / depenency hell / code rot and complexity issues here and layering more and more abstractions on top to try and dig ourselves out of the hole we're in might not be working anymore.
Sounds like literally every piece of corporate software I've worked on that's older than 10 years. 10 year old php app? 15 year old c++ app? 15 year old vb6 app? 15 year old c app? Those are all examples of previous nightmares I have experienced and none of them were any easier to handle than a shitty angular mess. At least the browser is incredibly resilient with regard to failure states... try debugging intermittent crashes in a legacy c++ app preserved in a tacky lacquer of clever templating voodoo; nothing in js land even comes close to my time in the c++ insane asylum.
I would argue that it's an absurdly overblown issue. The "costs" are a clear net gain which is why these tools are all but ubiquitous. Developer hype only goes so far, these tools are a proven success across every major tech company with a front-end presence. All this supposed complexity is a holistic improvement over the past, especially because all the same libraries and techniques from 20 years ago and everything in between work exactly the same way today.
> Anyone who's had to maintain one of these projects long term without a massive team or inherited an older codebase understands that there are serious churn / depenency hell / code rot and complexity issues here and layering more and more abstractions on top to try and dig ourselves out of the hole we're in might not be working anymore.
Sounds like literally every piece of corporate software I've worked on that's older than 10 years. 10 year old php app? 15 year old c++ app? 15 year old vb6 app? 15 year old c app? Those are all examples of previous nightmares I have experienced and none of them were any easier to handle than a shitty angular mess. At least the browser is incredibly resilient with regard to failure states... try debugging intermittent crashes in a legacy c++ app preserved in a tacky lacquer of clever templating voodoo; nothing in js land even comes close to my time in the c++ insane asylum.