[CipherThrowaway]

Feels a lot like a lengthier, polemical way of saying that frameworks become popular because they allow more people to do more stuff more easily. But this is bad because businesses benefit or something.

None of the ideas here stand up to scrutiny. For example, Angular with its more opinionated design and framework approach was a much better choice for regularizing developer effort and making devs fungible. But by all accounts it lost to React, which is frequently criticized in comparison for allowing too much individual variation in development style.

React itself has become increasingly more complex over the years as it's moved up the S curve and the design direction is driven towards more and more remote parts of the problem space. More than ever, it requires specialized knowledge to use correctly.

Svelte - of which the author is a fan - fits his thesis much more than React. Svelte is billed as simpler and easier to learn and use than React, without requiring developers to wrap their heads around concepts like hooks, reducers and suspense.

[Draiken]

> become popular because they allow more people to do more stuff more easily

Nope. Because they allow people to be easily replaced. Nothing to do with how easy or good the framework is. That's the whole point of the article.

[CipherThrowaway]

There is no point to the article. It's another boring anti-React/Electron screed but with a conspiratorial, junior high polsci bent to it.

Having frameworks that allow more devs to do more things means correspondingly that more people can be hired for those things with less training. In this respect, there is an obvious overlap between employer and developer interests.

Take MongoDB from the article. IME the biggest advocates for MongoDB are not managers (who barely have any idea what it is). It's developers who just want an "easy" way to store data that corresponds closely to the JSON document format they are used to, and doesn't force them to think about "annoying" and "outdated" things like relational modeling, joins and schema migrations.

If fungibility and lowest common denominator hiring drove the popularity of dev tools, then .NET and Angular would be ruling the roost.

[xboxnolifes]

Is that not one and the ame?

[pdonis]

No. The developer's interests (able to do more stuff more easily) and management's interests (making developers commodities instead of highly skilled workers) are emphatically not the same; that's a major part of the article's point. (Unless you're a developer that owns your own company so you are management--which is not the situation the article is talking about.)