I can't keep up with this stuff anymore. As a former "full stack" dev, I just quit the frontend part altogether and I'm now just focusing on the backend. It's just too much and changing too fast.
just don't upgrade random tooling all the time and you're good. most widely used JS stuff has an excellent backward compat story. (react itself is amazing in this regard IMO)
a corollary to this is that if you feel fatigued by having to constantly learn and upgrade your tooling, maybe you're just having regular old analysis paralysis and you're blaming the tooling for no good reason. just use the tools you already know and get going! you can build fantastic, modern-feeling software using only tools and knowledge from a decade ago.
Good luck with that in the NPM ecosystem
Note, it was different ~5 years ago. When we wanted to upgrade from react 15 to 16 for better runtime speed, we had to upgrade babel first and that required a webpack upgrade iirc. It was a mess. But the ecosystem has matured a lot since then and we haven't done major setup changes since. It just works.
Note that we're on React 17 now - 15 to 16 was hard but 17 was largely backward compatible. I expect 18 will be worth it too, the breakage is tiny. Like I said, React's backward compat story is real nice IMO :-) (and so is the tooling to help you address breaking changes)
Ha, this is actually a good idea that I didn't consider. I'll push for this, thanks!
There was a short lived explosion of frontend frameworks that grognards drag up like it's a relevant problem, but serving up HTML from a server side route has always been an option.
Angular and Vue were the thing last I was paying attention. Now React is the thing. But not so fast, there's Next.js.
I think I've had enough, I will supplement my Django backend templates with handwritten CSS.
I went with Nextjs with all its bells and whistles and expressjs (99% of cases is enough). Now I'm currently moving to MLE projects at work.
I only pay attention to new tech only if here's a huge demand (ie. Plenty of Jobs and good $$$). Only then I start learning it.
Nextjs/React won the frontend battle (atm). It's almost impossible to keep up + being specialist. Heck, it's equally difficult to be a generalist with new things coming up every 3/6 months.
A few years ago there were tons of frameworks and they all worked a bit differently. New shit every week. IMO that's because no one had really figured out the right paradigm yet. Now we have (it's components) and the framework race has slowed way down (it's pretty much React, Vue, and Angular now). Even big changes in React like Hooks didn't break backwards compatibility. You can move pretty slow and steady on that front, if you want to.
Tooling is the next frontier. It's become obvious that compiling js in js itself is just not performant enough for large applications. We need a faster solution. There are a few contenders right now (esbuild, swc, bun; vite wraps esbuild) but I suspect within two years we'll have a pretty clear winner.
In general I think things move faster when we haven't found the right ideas yet, and that's why backend is more stable -- it's just older. There has been more time to iterate and figure out what works and what doesn't. Frontend will probably always be more chaotic than backend, but I think it'll be much less so as we start to agree on the web want it to look like.
In many companies, you won't be tinkering with vite at all. The build person will do that, you will be reaping the benefits of it only.
Well, there are cobol devs for hire. So, tech alone is not sufficient to drive away all potential hires.
There might be other red flags
I think it has to do with frontend means designers/ux, and those people tend to like being in the spotlight and grab fame. Therefore it's logical that they just create / fork something instead of contributing to an existing project.
This results in buggy projects because they try to do everything, and unmaintained after a while. Usually they're also less thought out than with backend projects.