Developers are an interesting bunch "Why does anyone use Bootstrap anymore?" and then goes and creates basically the exact same components again by hand. Seems like that same trend repeats every couple of years "[Popular library] is now outdated, let me just create an in-house clone or move to identical but trendy [Popular library]." To be clear I very much like the USWDS components, but they are mostly 1:1 with Boot…
Nope, you're not missing anything really, but I'm sure glad that not every website looks like a Bootstrap 3. I think these government ones are more about keeping a consistent style and look across departmental websites, than advertising a product for general use. In fact, I think the government would not take very kindly to hobbyists making official-looking websites serving a non-government agenda. Front-end isn't th…
I've semi-frequently had to build custom tree views and tree selectors with multiple modes of operation and various amenities. And sometimes the way those complicated widgets are built requires that we customize more basic components like split-buttons or dropdowns to match so that users aren't thrown off.
Sometimes all of this can be accomplished by taking a library like Bootstrap and applying a theme. But sometimes the theme gets so intense that we realize we're basically just building Material UI on top of Bootstrap's code, and it makes more sense to use that library instead. And as mentioned before, sometimes there are just things that we can't get from Bootstrap or Material, but that we're going to use fairly often (last I checked, Bootstrap didn't have a 5-star rating widget).
The "It's Fashion!" narrative seems very appealing to people on HN, to the point that I'd advise people to double check that they're not falling for confirmation bias before proffering it as an explanation.