[JustSomeNobody]

Yes, it is called "Enterprising the sh out of it". And yes, Java (and C#/.Net) has a huge problem with that and Javascript is well on its way.

Large companies love to get cool haircuts and wear torn jeans and talk about building fast and being agile and yet, they continues to build frankenprojects.

[pbh101]

I can't speak to other projects, but I know the additional pieces of tooling I add to my buildchain are there to automate tasks that are otherwise undocumented/uncaptured and thus easily forgotten (Joel Test, step 2). On a team of ~50 core committers and ~100 intermittent committers across the globe (which isn't that big compared to other teams), if it doesn't have a CI build running and passing regularly, it will eventually break and stay broken. Examples: code generation, database schema generation and checking, dependency compilation, building artifacts. Other pieces of tooling I add to orthogonalize and amortize common tasks, e.g. Dagger2, Immutables, AutoFactory.

Again, I'm not familiar with flavor-of-week web dev stacks and I'm not defending all of it, but there are clearly steady-state benefits to tooling, even if the initial setup often ends up being a maze because it isn't in the critical path of core developers.

I think there is huge benefit to be gained from projects considering the aggregate bootstrap effort required to get the whole stack running. But I still think this fragmented, modular approach, even with the downsides discussed in this thread, is better than the likely alternative: depending and waiting on a company like Microsoft to deliver a monolithic development environment for which a Product Manager has spent literally years crafting and honing the bootstrapping experience before release.

EDIT: wording