> You can either shut yourself off from it and cement yourself into "oldman" oblivion, or actually try to understand why these tools exist.
For other languages/ecosystems I would agree. However, in the JS world there is a lot of stuff that exists simply to exist. There are typically multiple libraries to do the same thing (in general) but with someone else's opinionated take on it.
Sometimes I feel like the developer of framework B was having a hard time grokking framework A and just decided to roll their own, like framework A, except for the parts they didn't like or understand. Then someone came along and realized that framework B had gaping security issues and was horrifically slow- so they created framework C which is the more secure and performant opiniated take on framework B that was an opinionated take on framework A. But then after four long months the devs behind C no longer maintain it because they've moved on to WebAssembly so a team spins off a fork of C in Coffeescript.
In a lot of other communities they would've just evolved framework A, or C would've pushed some patches back to B. Or D would've taken over for C and there would've been a handoff.
It's effing ridiculous that if I go back to a 5 month old project I will spend all damn day getting a build from source to work.
It's not just the libraries and packages. It's the toolchain, the build pipeline (heaven forbid you look like a grandpa and still use Grunt!), the transpilers. I love that people are creating cool shit all the time, but it really seems like if the code didn't come from their team, they're going to iterate the idea and put out a competing package instead of contributing back to the original. And then we wind up with two unmaintained projects 6 months later...
It really feels like there aren't many people (at least making headlines) that have had to maintain an actual live production system for more than a year or two. It'll be interesting to see what these people are doing 5 years down the road...