[sapeien]

Clickbait title for the HN crowd, I sense that articles like these are analogous to the old which color to paint the bikeshed debate.

Front-end libraries and frameworks should be trivial because front-end web development is largely trivial, it's the ecosystem around it that has bloated in complexity, including Vue.js and React.

Take a standard API that is already simple enough to understand and use (DOM), and re-package it for people who wish to call themselves "software engineers" to justify the time they spend on making simple things work in a complicated fashion. If you disagree that front-end complexity is getting way out of hand, just read the source code of any modern single-page app including its dependencies.

I think that code written by amateurs cobbling together vanilla JS is generally faster in development and performance, more easily understood, and easier to maintain than code written by a professional web developer using whatever framework. The early web itself was largely cobbled together by hobbyists, and so should it continue to be.

The industry disagrees with me, that's fine. I'm aware there are many reasons why my views are the exception not the norm. I just hope that something far better supercedes this era of web development, which would require social and cultural shifts to occur.