[troad]

I think the pushback isn't so much against the existence of the tools per se, more against the pervasive idea that everyone needs them.

When every other learning resource is titled something like "Ten reasons you need to be using the MONGOOSE stack right NOW!", it's no wonder we've got people trying to shove redis into their baking blogs.

Matter of fact is, the average website would be fine without a "stack" of any kind, but no YouTuber sells sponsorships telling their viewers that. Ergo, many junior devs genuinely don't know that.

While I agree that people should be primarily learning the core tech, it's a difficult message to deliver amongst the cacophony of corporations trying to promote their services.

[zelphirkalt]

And also in jobs many if not most places you go will already have made decisions about how they do web stuff and once more juniors are being given the impression, that this is how things are done "professionally", while actually that is no more professional than any experienced hobbyist making their website and often worse in aspects such as accessibility (need to run JS and often breaking browser functionality like the back button), complexity (maintaining the interplay of all those tools and libraries), maintainability (updating your dependencies frequently), feedback cycle (complex build pipeline, instead of just delivering HTML, CSS and perhaps a sprinkle of JS).

This is why I don't want to do much frontend in businesses, where there is a separate dedicated FE team. It seems to me, that traditional fullstack devs, not FE devs who want to do backend stuff in NodeJS, but devs who happen to have learned web standards like HTML, CSS, and JS along the way, not as a "one ring to rule them all", make better websites. Maybe not as fancy optically, but often more responsive, and better in the listed aspects. But this may be bias, because such websites are far and few between these days.

[lambdaone]

As an example of this, I had to build a management interface for the backend of the project I was alluding to above; itself a web app in its own right. Written entirely in Python, with HTML templates, CSS and JS and a bit of SQL with no "web frameworks", no other dependencies except nginx to proxy requests to it. Easy and quick to develop (a couple of days), and very unlikely to suffer from software rot, unlike a web-framework based system - Python (at least since the Python 3 debacle) has excellent backward compatibility, and basic HTML, CSS and JS likewise.

What it did lack, though, were fancy widgets and other decorative bells and whistles. But is it worth the cost of pulling in the vast overhead of "modern" frameworks, and their resulting complexity and maintenance problems, just to have those?