That's precisely why it works: it presents an alternative to the liminality requirements of maintaining the Ballmer Peak (which is is too NP-hard to reproduce) by tapping into the underdeveloped PFCs in young developers everywhere and making them productive by psyop-hacking their sense of adventure into the pursuit of complexity.
It's honestly sad, but a nonetheless really interesting study in emergent psychological dynamics.
"React is built to appeal to young developers. By being complicated, internally consistent, and "selling itself", it keeps them working long hours on boring business tasks. Practically, it's not the right tool, but it keeps 'em happy and grinding away."
Words misused (all of them):
- liminal = transitional, "between worlds", arguable, but more "flow"
- ballmer peak = coding capability stemming from mild inebriation, not from an old man sense of duty
- NP-hard = difficulty comes from combinatorial explosion, not from the impossibility of making people love spreadsheets
As a used-to-be baby dev, I'd argue the appeal of web frameworks is 2-fold. Structured ways to do complicated stuff, and internal consistency.
I was probably already dealing with the quirky subtle delirium I get with onset head colds/flus when I wrote that yesterday (I'm now past it and at the sniffle stage lol). That's my excuse for the "u ok?" word salad there :P
Some clarifications following this feedback:
- ballmer peak: yep, pretty much - the latter interpretation is new to me
- liminality: the defocused focus referred to in the above, but specifically referring to the need to drink to make it work
- NP-hard: I was trying to make a joke about it being impossible to achieve the effects of the ballmer peak without drinking lol