I stopped paying attention to web dev for a few years, and those were the years when everything went from hand-written HTML + JS (+ PHP/ASP on the server side) to the likes of Node and React etc. You can imagine my confusion when I checked back in.

I'm dipping my toes in now for the first time since then, and I gotta say - I don't hate it as much as I thought I would. Yes, you can end up with library soup if you're not careful, but a lot of what used to be difficult is now quite easy. There's been genuine forward progress, and it's really nice to see.

(Though there does appear to be some kind of allergy in the web dev space to describing things intelligibly. It's never "XYZ is a stateless UI library built in TypeScript", it's always "XYZ lets you build bleeding-edge shardable solutions in the Web 3.7 space using YAML elem-nodes called 'qooms'. Let our bosomy anime mascot walk you through our getting started guide by simply piping this Discord link into a superuser shell")