[alazoral]

Some of it makes coding much faster, easier and safer in larger teams. Typescript massively increases velocity and code quality. React and other front end frameworks let teams do component-driven development and patterns like atomic design really neatly, which makes apps more consistent.

What that complexity is really buying is desktop-class web applications like Figma, Notion, and the like, and massively reducing the engineering costs of building products like those to the point where it’s way cheaper and easier to build a rich, complex web app that can run for anyone anywhere than it is to build desktop or mobile software with the platform-holders’ own APIs.

If you’re not doing one of those and are just doing a light crud app, then you probably want to use one of those desktop-class web apps like AirTable.

And if you want to make a static website, then we have some much better tooling you can opt into to make managing it and building it out faster, but it’s far from essential.

[Satam]

OP here. Thank you! I think your singling out of truly complex apps like Notion makes the situation more intuitive to me.

[PaulHoule]

Funny I was building apps like that in 2006 so now I look at most of the popular JS frameworks and think "gee those are good for form processing even if they might not be necessary" but not for the kinds of applications I was building back then.