Yes, definitely. There are too many diligent and too few lazy programmers. Too many devs take pride from coming up with complicated, overengineered abstractions – after all, if they can manage the complexity they must be really smart, right?
Take JSON API, a standardization of HATEOAS / REST principles around JSON and HTTP, for example. If you just naively walk up to it you think to yourself:
> Wait, what? Can't we just return the simple data we know we want? Why complicate this all with relationships, links, and meta data?
But after a while you realize that 90% of what you're doing could be abstracted if only you had a predictable output. So EmberData comes along and you write a Rails backend that has the nice advantage of not needing to worry about HTML (outside of OAuth / emails, anyway) and you harmonize your API. You use Ember Fastboot for slow clients and call it a day.
Someone else looking at what you've done may say:
> Wait, what? Why don't I just create static HTML pages instead of using your over complicated service?
And they're not completely off-base. In fact it's what I do for my own personal site. It's just that the context of their situation has different tradeoffs.
The same thing is true for a lot of software. Excel is "over-engineered" for most people. So is HTML. So is Unix. But in general what happens is that the person with the most complex requirements usually wins because they usually have the fattest wallet and everyone else papers over the complexity with abstractions or uses something less complex that meets their needs.
The Unix Hater’s Handbook [1] is a pretty good read (or skim). It’s healthy to remind oneself that, even though unix-likes are a savior from the deeply unpleasant alternatives, warts are present.
[1]: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~weise/unix-haters.html
This is what I feel about the current JavaScript ecosystem. I feel like web development became popular so programmers from other disciplines (C, Java, etc.) jumped in and found it to be too simple so they've hijacked the ship and created a new JS ecosystem that is as complex as their old environments.
Desktop development is blessedly simple, in contrast. The problem is that desktop development APIs and UI toolkits have been neglected for many years in favor of web and mobile, so now desktop development is also a fractured mess because much of it is outdated or hasn't kept up with current graphic design and UI standards. But, at its core, desktop development doesn't struggle with oddball concepts like promises and other bizarre features that were introduced to overcome issues with the overall design of the language/environment.
No, no, it’s that webdevs looked at other areas of programming and thought “we have to be complicated as them in order to be taken seriously”.