> Thing is if you’ve been around the block and have a decent understanding of fundamentals…it just doesn’t matter what the fad of the week is. It’s just noise. Old principles repackaged with different conventions.
This is just not true. Entire fields exist today that didn't exist or barely existed even a few years ago.
As an example, the field I've been working in for ~7 years is Data Engineering, and it was "relatively" new when I first started, or at least the modern way of doing it was. Since then, some specific technologies have become fairly commonplace, like Airflow and dbt.
Does this mean everyone should have experience with this tech? No, of course not. But does this mean that someone should know that the field exists and what's different about it compared to other kinds of stacks? For some people, absolutely it's important. A "senior" backend engineer who wants to solve an "ETL-pipeline to Data Warehouse" shaped project will hopefully know that there are standard modern tools in that area, and not just to try and do it with {insert their standard backend framework}.
Similarly, someone who hasn't "kept up with the times" in the world of frontends might not know much about SPAs. Are SPAs always the solution? No, there are now trends going back towards traditional server-only approaches. But there's a difference in knowing that they exist and what their place is and choosing a different approach thoughtfully, vs not knowing they are even a thing.