[johnfn]

I mean, this is easy to say, but I don’t think anyone in their right mind would willingly go back to 90s era web development of they had a choice. JS was a pitiful version of its current self - and good luck debugging it without browser debugging tools. CSS was done primarily with tables. Iframes were used everywhere. The state of the art web development IDE was notepad++. Browser inconsistencies were rampant and I hope you enjoy working around browser bugs because IE5 is ridden with them.

See, the thing about all the modern development infra we have is that it wasn’t just invented for fun - it solves real problems. Jquery was created to smooth over browser inconsistencies. Webpack was made so that when you import 20 JS files they don’t all clobber each other’s namespaces (ok, there’s a bit more to it, but bear with me here). NPM was made so that you can install dependencies without having to hunt down the JS download on Google.

This whole thing of looking at the past with rose colored glasses is a bit too easy to take too far.

[krapp]

Modern web development has also created its share of problems. Needing to import 20 JS files and manage namespaces isn't a problem anyone had before the JS community decided every "library" had to consist of only a single function rigged to an entire test suite with an arbitrarily deep dependency tree. Sure, finding libraries, adding them in script tags and uploading them directly to the server (or linking to a CDN) wasn't as convenient as using a package manager, but vast sections of the web didn't stop working because a repo got pulled or because the SPOF repository for the language went down.

And then you have compile-to-js languages like Typescript, and the entire paradigm of "javascript as bytecode" which, for all of their benefits in adding safety, also added exponential complexity. Frontend frameworks with their own unique paradigms that generate HTML and CSS entirely in JS, and ignore the separation of concerns the web is actually built around.

All of these have their place and their value, but the fact that "vanilla JS" is coming back as a trend might be a sign that things have strayed a bit too far in the wrong direction.

[johnfn]

I think it's just two camps. The vanillajs camp is people mostly working on their own, who can't imagine what all that overhead is for. The other camp is people mostly working at large corporations, who can't imagine any other way to deal with hundreds of engineers checking in code every day.