[solatic]

> I honestly can't fathom the reasons why we've encouraged JavaScript to eat the world

Who is "we"? The scenario isn't some God-like figure who made the decisions and handed them down to mortals to live with. The reality is more like evolution (one you actually described very well), where many different, independent players are each working in their own interest.

> Lowered the bar for acceptable quality

Define "quality". Especially given the evolution prism, I'd argue that quality is not a rubric like "best technical performance" but rather one like "permits as many people as possible to engage with as many parts of the stack as possible." With that definition of quality, the JS ecosystem is by far and indisputably the king of the mountain. Graveyards are littered with many "best technical quality" options (Betamax, Itanium...).

> time-to-product

Nitpick, the term is time-to-market. What matters is not just building and shipping your MVP (which can be done by one person, who can choose whichever technology stack) but continually shipping at high velocity over time as the company grows, the original engineers leave, etc.

[soggybutter]

> Who is "we"?

"we" is everyone in the industry. I recognize it's more of an evolutionary thing, it's just my stance that the current environment is pushing us towards an evolutionary dead end.

> Define "quality"

I also agree that software quality is fairly subjective depending on your lense, unfortunately. For example, I wouldn't view quality as permitting as many people as possible to work at every level. Diversity of ideas is great, but I want those ideas to come from folks who have the skillset. If someone who roofs houses decides to pour foundations without gaining the proper skillset or picking up different tools I would view that as a loss of quality, not a gain.

> the term is time-to-market

I chose time-to-product fairly intentionally, because I think the benefits of something like Javascript start to rapidly decay once you start approaching any sort of product maturity. The problem is teams rarely optimize towards stability and quality until they have literally no other option

[solatic]

> I want those ideas to come from folks who have the skillset

When the industry/society comes around and finally can get behind the idea of requiring licensing for software engineers to practice, get back to me :) . Until such a level playing field is imposed on all players, such practices impose a cost that your competitors are not paying, and they will out-manuever you and out-ship you.

> start to rapidly decay once you start approaching any sort of product maturity

Perhaps time-to-maturity then? Because it's besides the point that maturity is a characteristic necessarily of successful products. You find success by iteratively shipping.

> teams rarely optimize towards stability and quality until they have literally no other option

First make it run, then make it stable, then make it optimized. Pre-mature optimization is the root of all evil. This additionally lends focus to why the business can get behind such efforts: you need product flexibility to grow from $0 to $Xmillion/year, then you need to protect the $Xmillion/year so that it's not at risk from incompetence, hackers, etc., then after your user count stops growing, you continue to grow profits by cutting costs (e.g. by using more efficient languages like Rust that let you serve the same customers on less hardware).