Since the author mentioned webpages/webapps, to that I'd like to add that the insanity of both backend, but especially frontend frameworks has gotten out of hand. Forget it that I literally hate React more than I hate any other framework I came across, but even if I did like it - not only React, but even JavaScript is entirely unnecessary on 95% of pages, on any given website. SPAs have a place with things like maps or Crypto Exchanges, fine. Are you building one of them? No? Break down your site into pages with normal URLs, learn yourself some CSS (without css frameworks! I'd only argue SCSS is better because of nesting) and learn about HTML tags, which are plenty and can do awesome things out of the box. Some pages may require a bit of Javascript. Maybe a bit more. But don't be buying into this bullshit of React or other frameworks. If it need be so, maybe write your own? For your purposes? And for the love of god, don't be sharing it. Who cares. Be an artist for the user. Make your code work 10 years from now without making any changes to it, even. In any code, in any language. Can you do it?

Today I had to use Node.js and grunt (first time I hear about it) which installed npm packages and "compiled" it all into the Chromium extension I needed. The extension's actually good, but it itself uses Angular and ton of other packages, 50 or 70 maybe. What in the actual...?

On the backend side... Why do you need a framework? Learn yourself some CGI, write small programs. Sure, use libraries, but also maybe try a compiled language, so it runs faster, isn't as simple to hack if someone breaks in. Besides, Cloudflare and the likes of them (also hated by me and many) protects from most attacks anyway (and that would be one single positive aspect of the existence of these captcha racket-companies). So you won't need to learn much at first. You don't want spam? Maybe ask your users to pay first. Then it's much harder to perform a DDoS if most of your website is behind a paywall. Nothing is free. Everyone complained about how Bitcoin mining is bad for the environment etc... yea yeah. Next time don't use React and Ruby On Rails for your Blog with two and a half articles in it.

P.S. My sincere recommendation for anyone: find and listen to Jonathan Blow's interviews and talks (not the twitch streams - they're too long and boring). This man understands many important things, not the least of which is that game devs, somehow, manage to waste less resources while people are playing their pretty demanding games, less than certain websites do. Or that Twitter's engineers being let go is because you don't need that many engineers to build a micro-blogging platform that hasn't even changed all that much over the years. It appears to me there's a lot of scamming going on in the startup/VC industry. You get a $2mil check and hire expensive devs - also pay yourself nicely, of course - to build something I can probably build in 3 months for $15k and it'd be better. I had founded and financed a company myself. And even when we finally got external funding (not much) we never paid ourselves as founders, not the once. VCs in the US don't care (not their money and the inflation forces them to just stuff it into whatever comes their way) and founders are happy to be sort of "working for themselves". No wonder the success rate is low.