Do all the high quality folks just leave the JS community beyond a certain threshold?
Then people started stacking more and more things on top of those libraries, creating a giant dependency morass of microdependencies that larger frameworks are now build on top of. And because all these frameworks do things just different enough from each other, every larger library that a dev would want to integrate with those frameworks now needs a specialized version to work with those frameworks.
In most languages, if you want to know how something works, you can usually dig into your dependency tree and by the time you hit the stdlib's optimization spaghetti/language internals, you'll probably have figured out what's causing your snag/what the library is expecting out of you. In JavaScript, you hit the dependency morass and have to give up. Most competent devs then decide to pick another language.
You can write very legible JavaScript these days, even without a framework, but it looks nothing like JavaScript used in a framework.
The other language I know of with this issue is, ironically, Rust.
The one thing salvaging Rust for now is a lack of similar frameworks, but who knows how long that will last.
Nobody else can understand how it's built, but for some reason that's not their problem? It's not like they're taking the time to understand how React is built, either. But as soon as you do something on your own, whoooa buddy. Cowboy programmer alert. It's not good engineering if it's a single, coherent, vertically integrated system. It's only good engineering if it's a mishmash of half-solutions teetering on top of each other.
I still do a lot of programming. And I expect my developers to be competent enough to read other people's code and figure out how it works, what it does, how to use it, based on the tests and plenty of extant examples.
I don't want developers who can only be productive in libraries that everyone else's is using/posting YouTube tutorials on/feeding LLM training corpus'.
The problem with adopting other people's software is that you have to make it work for your purposes, all while accepting it was only ever originally designed for their purposes. And if that's open source and you contribute to it, then you have to make sure all your changes don't break other people's work.
But with my own libraries, I can break anything I want. I have, like, 5 projects using them. It's not a big deal to discover an architectural problem and completely refactor it away to a newer, better design, propagating the change to all the others that use it in fairly short order.
And I don't have to argue with anyone about it. I can just do it and get the work done and prove it was the right thing to do long before any Github PR would ever get out of review.
I don't understand why people get so up in arms over npm modules, as if you could stand up code that does the same things in another language without having to manage dependencies.
For example, in the 2000s and 2010s, javascript had the lowest barrier to entry by far thanks to browser dev tools, so a lot of what you saw was people with no prior experience teaching people with no prior experience. These people are still around, and while plenty have improved, they still form the basis of modern javascript practice.