Instagram engineers found some remarkable simple solutions to some hard problems. It's not easy to come up with these solutions. Designing the IDs for example is no small feat, but since this is now common knowledge it's probably not too hard to build a similar system.
Which makes things like Vercel so depressing to me.
You've got a company paying off influential people in a space where people are looking for guidance, convincing them that they too have hard problems that cannot settle for simple solutions.
Selling the narrative that developers need to be all in on the most irrelevant aspects of building a product, and ignoring the fact that if you instead focus on building simple, easy to maintain software, the fact your LCP isn't hyper optimized by some newly invented mental model for app development won't matter: Google (or any search engine for that matter) will not ignore the fact people just actually want your content.
They do not care how great your web core vitals are if you waste a bunch of time bending over for some irrelevant bullshit problem instead of talking to users and iterating.
The fun part is often all that bullshit hyper optimized complexity can still be beaten on all the web core vitals by a humble LAMP server
So not only are you wasting your time on all the wrong things, you're also gaining nearly no benefit from it
I'm pretty convinced that all these shiny new hotness tools and frameworks of the past decade are actually just meant to sabotage competition and small companies
I agree - for most of them. One exception would be React/Vue/other frontend frameworks that split updating the state and visualizing it. It sounds like a small thing, but it makes a world of difference in non-trivial projects, compared to native js / jquery. Then again, it's the idea itself that matters, overoptimizing the implementation is not beneficial. I.e., React classes are just as good (or better) as hooks as far as I'm concerned, it would be better if they would let it be at that stage.
The RFC was driven by Vercel. Vercel announced RSC landing in experimental on stage before the React team even updated their docs
I'm not even going to get into how ridiculous it is that the default config chosen was to break people's builds for a feature that isn't mature enough to have anything more than a single reference implementation from Vercel.
To get traction from users is the real challenge.