> I don't know about others but I tire of these comments chiding the "out of control" front-end ecosystem

Old people also get tired by all these "apps" wining for your attention; they want "just a phone". Young people grew up with it. Note to self: I'm getting old.

Old people were used to buying development toolset (compiler+tools+IDE), usually including a physical book, with which they can create software. Young people are used to assessing open source projects, and piecing a project together on top of many freely available libraries/frameworks.