I'm not sure I agree fully with everything Jared has written here – and there's a strong feeling of bias-tinted vision to some of the claims – but I enjoyed the overall trend of the argument and felt there were a few nuggets worth saving. In particular, I do think that the heavy focus on React is churning out a generation of developers that will be underskilled once React is no longer as popular. And that the way the React community has behaved for the better part of the last decade is appalling. But I'm not quite so sure that the nostalgia towards other web frameworks is truly warranted; nor do I think the framing of front-end development as particularly useful. Like it or not, React provides a suite of APIs and tools that solve otherwise tricky problems easily. And whilst I agree with Jared's inferences that not all of the solutions it provides are actually solving for genuine user needs, some of them definitely are. So I think there's a little more grey painted into the view before me, than the black and white imagined in this piece 😉

On the disparity between the bulk majority of web development work and the online discourse around it:

There has been a small but mighty ecosystem of “influencers” peddling a sort of “pop culture developer abstractions” ethos on the web whether it’s about React, or CSS-in-JS, or Tailwind CSS, or “serverless”, or “microservices”, or (fill in the blank really)—and they’re continuing to gaslight and obfuscate the actual debates that matter.

On the role of JavaScript on the web, and in particular the issue with learning it as a foundational part of the web stack (or even worse, learning its abstractions instead of the underlying technologies like HTML and CSS):

JavaScript is not required to build a simple web site. JavaScript is an “add-on” technology if you will, the third pillar of the web frontend alongside HTML and CSS. HTML, CSS, and (eventually) JavaScript. Not JavaScript, JavaScript, and JavaScript.

On how we've wound up in a situation where we have "trends" of technology that fail to become foundations of future tools:

The problem is an industry rife with faulty thinking that assumes (a) popular technology is popular because it’s good, and (b) the web platform itself is somehow severely lacking even in 2023, so heavily abstracted frontend frameworks remain a necessity for programmer happiness.