> It can be summed up as "don't use technology without understanding it, and don't blindly follow the crowd." But then again, how are you supposed to learn when a certain piece of technology should be applied, other than apply it and see how it goes?

That's called research. You do it on your own time, while using more mature & proven solutions for daily work. Play with it, review all the source code. Like it or not, it's going to be your code, once you start using it in earnest. Don't treat it like a friendly black box.

Is that too much to do? Then you're going to have a lot of surprises. Maybe that's fun for you, but I have to say it gets really old over the years.

> It requires a certain amount of cognitive dissonance to point to Etsy's 2000 files as a failure while at the same time they are a successful company.

Er, no, it doesn't require cognitive dissonance at all. In fact, the folks at Etsy blogged about the issues themselves.

It's a common thing for a fast moving, highly successful project to accumulate gunk under the excuse of "it works for now, we'll clean it up later". But, if the clean up never comes, that gunk eventually becomes a noticeable drag on daily development.

> And it's not a particularly interesting one, imho. I'm not sure why so much ink is spilled on it other than it's easy to form opinions around.

If it's not particularly interesting, then why are you reading about it and responding to it? :)