Kind of like swimming against the current back when JQuery/Angular were the dominant ones and suggesting React would get you laughed out of the room? How nobody would care if you could use React because every business was using and only hiring for JQuery devs?
The cycle continues. People acting like the [current popular thing] is the problem are missing the forest for the trees.
Resisting change for the sake of it, and having space to make pragmatic choices not based on popularity are quite different things.
The latter got a lot worse. Along with React came the rise of evangelists, celebrities and their courses and a generation of developers raised on the idea that github stars are the ultimate measure of software quality. The jQuery era was peaceful by comparison!
I think if you let what lives in your toolbox define you as a developer, you’re selling yourself short.
If you’re a decent engineer, learning a new library should be the boring part. It’s not like any of these libraries are introducing highly specific conceptual paradigms.
Individually or in small projects you might be able to do whatever you want. Won’t help when you work in a large team, going against hundreds of minds inclined to follow trends and maintain the status quo, which is reality at almost any business.
The average developer doesn’t get to choose at all. This liberty was taken away from them in the name of “easier maintenance”, a “larger
community”, “stability” (ha) and other ill-informed platitudes. This became a self-reinforcing cycle when companies started hiring for React experience.
The cycle continues. People acting like the [current popular thing] is the problem are missing the forest for the trees.