I taught myself coding during high school in the mid-1990s, built a lot of my own web projects, and I worked for a series of startups. I've loved web dev for over 25 years.

A long-term coding contract recently ended for me, so I have been looking for some new full-stack web dev work. Everything I encounter now is tangled in over-engineered dependency hellscapes. Simple sites that could be vanilla HTML/CSS/JS are instead built and rebuilt on whatever tools and frameworks are currently trendiest. Technology is selected because it is cool instead of appropriate. I don't mind learning new tech if it's useful and fitting, but I loathe the 'disposable skills' of dumping frameworks every 2 years.

I've watched this tendency gradually growing in web dev circles for about a decade, but in just the past few years it's gone bananas. It's so much unnecessary faffing, it's got me looking into other fields for new work.