[JMTQp8lwXL]

Meteor, as a framework, was solid for its time. I don't think they could've envisioned how much the JavaScript ecosystem would change after its launch. It tried to solve a great deal of problems that ultimately were solved in smaller, more focused libraries.

[bnjmn]

Thanks, this is a good take.

I would add: now it's everyone else's job to make those smaller, more focused libraries work together. The time wasted is unfathomable, but the blame for misconfiguration now falls on individual developers, rather than monolithic frameworks. Progress?

[JMTQp8lwXL]

At least in terms of tooling, you see things like create-react-app, vue-cli, etc. These toolkits, and their accompanying CLIs, abstract away configuration of babel, webpack, etc.

These are good, but if you need to customize further, you interface with the toolkit (which only allows you to go so far), or you eject entirely.

Many people think it's time wasted to really understand how to setup and use (individually) webpack and babel and friends. I disagree because if you ever do need to dig in to these tools, since you've used them individually, you understand what you need to change.

If you eject from a toolkit but don't understand the underlying tools, you could be up a creek without a paddle. So you can certainly make things simpler, but you can't replace having the experience and understanding of what each individual tool does, and how to interface with it.

I would say the ecosystem changes, in aggregate, are probably a loss for new programmers. You have a much wider API surface to be aware of when using all the tools and how to integrate them. But for a senior front end engineer, it's unlocked the ability to have very fine grained control over the bundles you're creating.

[indalo]

The power comes in two fronts. The ease that the cli tools you mentioned to help you gather a solid baseline of these smaller packages, and then, giving you the ability to decompose the features into interchangeable parts by ejecting or just by virtue of how small the packages are. The problem with monolithic frameworks in my opinion lies with the second part, they develop to he opinionated and for valid reasons, but sometimes that create really intense friction when changes need to happen in particular ways.