Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)

The thing I've seen the most in this industry is the opposite of that: teams that would mostly use third-party tools and frameworks, but the result was effectively the same, with complexity exploding and becoming so unbearable that the teams inflated to compensate, with productivity grinding to a halt. It happens with third-party tools as often as it does with NIH.

Like you say, Kafka, Kubernetes and Spark would add a higher-degree of complexity. They aren't really that simple to manage in real world production environments. That's the problem here: the complexity. It doesn't matter where it comes from, it will bite you in the ass.

One extreme of that is off-the-shelf enterprise software, that often requires a team of consultants to integrate. I've seen a few disaster, one software specifically started with a 500.000 price, but things became so complex the project ended up costing 4x that. There is no panacea against complexity. It costs money and takes time.

The main problem here seems to be the "questionably designed and lacks readily available support" part, which is something universally bad, even when using third-party software. You can design your infrastructure badly. You can make questionable design using third-party tools just as much as you can with your own code. And support is also very often not readily available.

"Similarly, if everyone agrees on using Kubernetes and Docker"

I'm totally sympathetic to things becoming standards, and I don't have an axe to grind with those two tools, but the reason for the pushback against tools like Kubernetes and Docker is grounded on reality. Not only they introduce complexity by themselves, they are often just band-aids for accidental complexity introduced by teams and by third-party things like programming languages and frameworks.

"The senior in the team is in charge of deciding what approach to use."

The only thing I'd like to add is that the senior is rarely free in their decision. It is often an unspoken choice dictated by culture and upper management. (Ironically it's worse in companies with technically apt management.)

You work in a Java shop, everything else than the couple of standard Java frameworks will be an uphill battle and you bear all the risk to get your problems blamed on your framework choice.

This is not an excuse of course, but unfortunately our choices are rarely by technical merit alone.

The following 39 titles have appeared on the front page 5+ times, based on an exact text match, excepting a year indicator in parentheses, e.g., "(2023)". Note that the apostrophe glyph differs in the 2nd & 3rd entries for Peter Roberts AMAs:

     1   10 OpenSSL Security Advisory
     2    7 I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA
     3    7 I’m Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA
     4    7 Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine
     5    7 The Architecture of Open Source Applications
     6    7 The TTY demystified
     7    7 Why GNU grep is fast
     8    7 You and Your Research
     9    6 Bit Twiddling Hacks
    10    6 Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures
    11    6 How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary
    12    6 The Bipolar Lisp Programmer
    13    6 Why Lisp?
    14    5 A Primer on Bézier Curves
    15    5 A regular expression to check for prime numbers
    16    5 Advanced programming languages
    17    5 Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
    18    5 Ask HN: Idea Sunday
    19    5 Ask HN: What are you working on?
    20    5 Beej's Guide to Network Programming
    21    5 DNA seen through the eyes of a coder
    22    5 Data Structure Visualizations
    23    5 How Software Companies Die
    24    5 How to Read Mathematics
    25    5 How to Write a Spelling Corrector
    26    5 Learning Advanced JavaScript
    27    5 Notation as a Tool of Thought
    28    5 Statistical Data Mining Tutorials
    29    5 Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics
    30    5 Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
    31    5 Ten Rules for Web Startups
    32    5 Terms of Service; Didn't Read
    33    5 The Book of Shaders
    34    5 The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing
    35    5 The Tao of Programming
    36    5 The case of the 500-mile email
    37    5 Who Can Name the Bigger Number?
    38    5 Why Lisp macros are cool, a Perl perspective
    39    5 You can't tell people anything

("Front page" here means the archived HN front pages under the "past" link at the top of the page here.)

Data through 2023-06-21.

I could run the analysis based on the URL rather than title, but that would require parsing the raw HTML which I've yet to do.

I'm not sure what made you think it's an "appropriate" framework, it's literally antipattern on antipattern and it's not even the worst thing, neither is the fact it's 10x slower than anything else out there - what's worst is the blatant lying, bunch of security issues and using it as an advertising platform to push subpar services onto devs stuck with it.