Webdev is the pinnacle of over engineering. And now with AI, it will get even worse. I think the web truly needs a reset.
Imagine you wanted to make a native desktop app that runs on Windows (going back to Windows 95), and OSX, and Linux, and have it use the end users choice of native components, QT, or GTK. It also has to load fast, be accessible, and work on desktop, laptop, and phones. Also, you're only allowed to ship a single binary but you can load in assets based on the device when it runs.
The app could be anything from a single page that renders one image up to a complete 3D game. Users want 60FPS regardless of what it is.
I reckon you'd end up with a relatively complicated build pipeline.
That's what webdev is today.
It's not React's fault that some devs don't know how to make a form in HTML. There is an argument that React doesn't spend much time telling people they might not need it, but that's not really their responsibility, plus there are some things (reactivity to other things on the page) that are common enough that seeing the boundary where you do or don't need it is actually quite hard.
it's kind of the same for react. yes you could build one thing in vanilla js, another thing with htmx, and then a third in react. or just build all three in react and be done with it.
modern web dev is actually pretty simple now, there is still a stigma around webdev from the olden days but spinning up vite + react is trivial, doesn't pull a ton of dependencies, and makes it easy to build anything you want. yes you can still overcomplicate it massively but that's on the dev at that point.
But now we have abstractions upon abstraction, slow ands heavy solutions for almost every thing.
Software is slower than ever, not because of hardware, but because of the endless bloat and abstraction every framework brings.
No, I'm saying that I, as a single person, couldn't have any idea what the other 99% is doing and what their needs are. This field is ENORMOUS. There are hundreds of thousands of different types of problems being worked on. I don't know what complexity or requirements they're face and neither do you.
I've got 15 years and 6 jobs and I've still probably seen < 1% of the actual development work being done. And thinking that I can extrapolate form that 1% the other 99% is insane to me.
Most of the jank of the modern platform doesn't come from JavaScript - it comes frame dependency hell, framework layered over framework, and over abstraction. It is a _cultural_ problem, rather than a technical one.
What should happen is that we take the lessons that we learned from this current iteration of the web and desktop and turn it into a new generation while cutting out the crap we don't need.
if anything the migration of all these tools to rust makes things way less complicated. you have a binary for compiling your react code (totally optional btw, it's a performance optimisation), a cli for building your app (vite, built on a rust binary basically), and react itself which is virtually dependency free. where is the over engineering here?