Man, my first startup in 2010 used protovis, the charting library Mike Bostock built before deciding d3 was the better approach. It was rough to have an 8 month old startup with a core piece of tech that suddenly stopped improving.

My main takeaway from so much of this is that "just a chart" is one of the biggest sources of hidden complexity in displaying useful information to people. It's right up there with "a simple web form" and "a web page with some simple interactivity."

Everybody has a wildly different idea of what good looks like. Defaults will never be right. Personal and global taste changes annually. We clown react (rightly) for constantly reinventing the same 4 wheels, but customers gleefully use new stuff all the time.

It's kind of amazing that d3 has been so durable in the frontend world. It really is a wrapper over a pretty solid approach. And yeah, that approach is complex, but that's the reality of visualization. It's hard to imagine another one that's that good.