[wwweston]

I think you're underestimating the degree to which fashion imposes de facto requirements on day-to-day working conditions.

It's non-trivial to pick up a front-end/full-stack engineering position at this point without having committed to React-specific development. Even knowing a runner-up (Angular, Vue, Svelte, maybe Ember) can put you on the bottom side of probabilities, and not having bought into any big-name framework will likely change your chances by an order of magnitude.

And fashion mismatches are often enough about more than aesthetics -- they're often about the kinds of problems you're well-equipped to regularly solve.

Some fashions build up enough momentum that anyone who doesn't want to solve the problems it introduces (or use its proposed solutions to existing problems) is justified in being worried that the fashion will choose them.

[tambourine_man]

> It's non-trivial to pick up a front-end/full-stack engineering position at this point without having committed to React-specific development

I’m speaking from experience. I write PHP, jQuery and plain CSS. There’s plenty of market. Never felt React (or Angular, Ember, Backbone) where worth the trouble. Same for SASS, Typescript, WebPack. So I don’t use it. And it’s fine.

There’s of course job opportunities for a specific tech. Just don’t get those if you dislike them. There are plenty others.

Our industry is indeed much more fashion driven than it should for a field that aspires to be a hard science. But it is also so freaking huge that even niches can support a lot of people.