No, that's not mandatory. Actually, only the big, shitty, consultancy shops (Accenture, Deloitte, etc) look stricly for licensed engineers, mostly because, funnily enough, they're usually hired for much less than the average SWEs. Actually there's kind of a shared feeling in the industry that licensed software engineers are dumbasses.
How do you host your stuff on, say, GCP? App engine? Only 1 per project. Compute Engine? Basically a VPS. Cloud Run? Ok, good luck with stuff that requires long running requests or listening to events from a source different from Google Cloud Pub/Sub, because your instances are eventually going to scale down to 0 and not wake up if no HTTP requests are incoming, so basically not an options for microservices if you're rolling with a non-google event broker. Need to host other Kafka, Elastic search, or anything else non-trivially deployable? How do you do that?
I've always been interested in buying one, but since I'm curre tly budgeting for other major investments I'm not willing to spend like 350€+ for an ergodox. Are there decent sub 100€ non diy (i have never soldered anything in my life) split keyboards around afayk?
Speaking of gamedev and jQuery, I work at a company where we basically make games for education purposes, for high profile universities, mostly. The games are all web applications, and we've learned to bend React in each and every direction to best serve our uncommon use case. A few months ago we needed some extra firepower, and offloaded a project to a small team of external consultants. I'm still shocked by what they shipped: the smoothest and juiciest web game I've ever seen, made with the messiest and most ancient clusterf€#k of jQuery I've ever witnessed in existence.
The moral of the story to me is: no matter how cool your new shiny tool is, old, battle-tested tools have generated generations of wizards which, given the right scenario, can still bring magic to the table.
For me, readable code is smart code wrote in a way that makes it readable by dummies. I've seen both 1000locXfile imperative spaghetti messes and super modular dogmatic Clean Code/Hexagonal Architecture/DDD stuff, and I can tell you that both can be nightmare inducing. I'm no big brainer, but I've always been praised for being the guy who produces legible code which other devs, even juniors, don't fear messing with. How? I simply don't push my code to extremes like it's gonna prove I'm smarter than I need to be for my job. And I model pretty damn intricated logic for a job.
What I've found out, after going from a pretty damn athletic lifestyle (10+ years of boxing) to turning into a full-fledged couch potato (smart working, working from home, pandemic, accumulated injuries preventing me to exercise regularly), is that the body is pretty forgiving as long as you keep it under a constant exercise routine, but it suddenly starts taxing you as soon as you become sedentary. Pretty recently I've taken a photo with a colleague coming to visit my hometown, and I couldn't recognize that fat f#@k in the photo which was supposed to be me.
This feels completely unneeded and a huge step backwards. Sure, TypeScript's language server is slow af, and making it better is no easy task, but TypeScript's syntax and overall language mechanics are the best I've ever used and I'm not trading them for whatever DX improvement this stuff promises to bring.