[_coveredInBees]

I could not agree more with you. So many folks here seem to be missing the actual utility of D3 and why it still remains relevant and useful in todays JS/Web landscape.

If you need standard stuff, there are plenty of awesome plotting libraries that utilize D3 on the back-end while abstracting the complexity away from you. Some even try to give you some amount of flexibility and composability to customize them, but they are always going to have limitations compared to the raw power and flexibility you have if you roll your own D3 visualization.

You can't have it both ways, and that's something a lot of people don't seem to understand. If you're absolutely sure that a visualization library can support all your requirements, then it is absolutely the easier way to go about doing things. But you just have to be really sure that your requirements aren't going to change past the limitations of the visualization library of choice.