[AshleysBrain]

I think the overlooked lesson is: the more technology you add in to your stack, the harder it is to maintain. Shallow tech stacks - using fewer tools and frameworks wherever possible - are usually a good idea to minimise your maintenance headaches.

If you're making a small quick tool, vanilla JavaScript is not a bad choice. You don't have to use npm, TypeScript, and a bunch of frameworks. If you do anyway then sure, you can end up in a situation where 90% of your work is maintenance, but you made that tradeoff - these should be things you consciously weigh up and decide, not just do automatically.

[lionel_ZA]

I agree with this view. Any large, complicated project with a large number of dependencies is going to require maintenance over time, regardless of the language or package ecosystem. Keep your simple projects simple, and if you need to use dependencies to get something off the ground quickly, either be prepared to maintain it or to do some additional work to remove the need for those dependencies over time.

[Doxin]

There's still a difference between javascript and other languages with respect to dependencies. E.g. if I open a 5yr old python project there's a fair chance all the dependencies still exist and still work with a more recent python interpreter, let alone work at all.

My --limited, to be fair-- experience with npm is that you can barely look away from a project for a week or it'll have a bunch of deeply broken dependencies, requiring you to update them which then breaks other dependencies in turn.

[namaria]

Fred Brooks has been warning us that the key problem with software development is 'how to keep complexity at bay'. Half a century later we're still wondering why sloppy complexity management bites us in the ass later on.