[braythwayt]

Look, Sturgeon's Revelation is that "90% of everything s CRUD." That's true of almost every technology I've encountered in 45 years of programming.

It's especially true when you lower the bar to entry. There's lots of CRUD because anybody can make something. It also means there are lots of things.

If you want well-documented stuff, vote for it by not using things that are poorly documented. Or figure it out and write the documentation. That's how open source works (or doesn't work), and JS/Webdev is not unique in this regard.

Microcomputers were poorly documented way back in the 70s. I'll be there were people complaining how shoddy they were on that basis, but that low barrier to entry led directly to us having this discussion on Hacker News today.

[pteraspidomorph]

If it's my decision to make, then yes, I'll do one of those things.

[braythwayt]

Of course you will, as do I. But it's no good moaning about the fact that they let just about anybody buy a computer and write software.

That's literally why we're all here, because they let anybody buy a computer and write software, even people who can't be bothered to write documentation, or people who are too busy optimizing advertising click-through to give us good search results from a web browser.

My thesis is that this is not limited to JS and WebDev, it's everything! It's just very visible with JS and WebDev.

If there's anything in particular to focus on, I'd focus on package management. You pick something that seems well-documented, and next thing you know you have dozens or hundreds of other things baked into your app.

If you go off the beaten path and need to break the abstraction of the thing you chose, you find yourself wrestling with the things that author chose.