Don't make me think, or why I switched to Rails from JavaScript SPAs

Agreed but as evident in this post's discussion, developers only have the desire to do so once for and then the need to do so again for any other framework is understood as the other being clearly terrible and immature.

I don’t understand this sort of criticism.

First, these generators are incredibly flexible. You can easily construct one command that fits your requirements. Understanding the correct options, your requirements for every part of the tool chain, and their occasionally predictable down-the-road implications takes quite some time, admittedly. However, all professional tools require knowledge and doc reading and experience with the latest bleeding-edge tools and experimentation and luck, I assume. Once you get a few years of experience under your belt working with this tool chain (not skipping the 3-4 hours per day after work to keep up with the latest JS ecosystem updates for this and the other new stacks you’ll need to learn throughout the week) you’ll be able to craft a command that requires very little reading or luck to use, and it could work, unmodified, for days, if not a week. If it turns out to not actually do what you want, you probably want the wrong thing— just ask on SO. But one-and-done, friend. Set it and forget it.

Second, this is all really easy if you just take the time to understand the tool chain. It’s just 4 or 19ish crucial, interdependent parts that all really should be in place from the very beginning and only most of them have inscrutable configuration schemas. Some are even documented! If you need more handholding than that, Sally, countless domain experts in countless online fora eagerly offer guidance like “go learn how X works first” or “lol that guide is weeks out of date— you have to use knippull.js instead of GROUNCE because GROUNCE was taken over by FlammBae last week and they’re just trying to sell add-ons for their data store and have ignored all PRs to support the latest version of SLAPPD which flibBleJs uses to transmogrify bNumbn{e}rs templates which you need for tr1xBits.js to work.” Once you understand how that all works, and understand how the generators implement those things, know how to compensate for the NBCF delta (Non-Backwards-Compatible Feature delta which calculates the number of implementation changes between typing the first character of your command and hitting enter,) theoretically your one-and-done is undeniably achievable.

Finally, people overstate the complexity of fixing a project started with the wrong boilerplate. Just experiment a bit. Spend a few days trying all the options to see which welcome pages don’t look broken in your browser (unless, of course, you’re using Waggle with FlermBox) and then narrow it down a bit based on that, and then just pick one. You can always fix it if it’s wrong. A literal child could understand the concept of “delete your project and start fresh” so I don’t think it should be hard to explain the concept to experienced software developers.

Developers used to paralyzingly straightforward legacy logic and organizational paradigms love to say that JS web dev tooling has the logical structure of a Wallace and Gromit short. They're completely ignoring the fact that this process was not designed— it evolved, and that’s okay. Not great, but okay.

Ultimately, it might look a little weird and insane and fragile if you peel back the onion skin to see how the sausage gets its secret sauce— but you too can achieve the pinnacle of modern developer push-button convenience with JS.

I guess your point is that this would change constantly, which isn't really the case.

Yarn and NPM has been around for a long time. Yarn 1 used to be the better choice since NPM stagnated, now they're a bit more equal.

Typescript has been around for a long time. So has ES6 modules. Same for Jest and Mocha.

The only thing that is changing somewhat are the bundlers and build tools (thankfully, they've been the weakest part of FE dev for a long time).

I've kept up with frontend for many years. There really isn't all that much "fatigue" if one actually understands what the tools do and the niches they fill.

React, Webpack, Eslint, Jest, React Testing Library

That’s the standard setup nowadays and it’s what most people should go with. If you want type checking, add TS to the mix.

But seriously, just use Next.js you can build tiny static sites with it and you can build complex SPAs. It’s very lightweight and basically just strings together all these tools while adding some convention that you can follow if you wish.

You're right but tbh some docs are kinda horrible. Tried to go through the Spring MVC docs, didn't get far. But maybe I was just being impatient idk.