Exactly, that's one of the reasons I'm so happy where JS is as an indie dev (def not professionally though). JS has gone through so many "you need a factory factory factory", and now we have gone back to basic principles. A few examples I've lived:
- Browser incompatibilities. You couldn't just do X, because in other browsers X might behave differently. So you would write X blueprint and use an X factory that would auto-generate code for the different browsers. This applies to both JS, CSS and HTML BTW.
- Then the modules+bundlers came. Initially they were , but when you had multiple you wanted to concatenate them for performance ofc, and in Node.js you wanted a way to import them. So a tool for each was created, then a tool on top of both was created, and thus a factory of factories of sorts was created.
- Then ES6+ came, which was similar to the first point so I won't bother you with it.
- Then Webpack and all of its derivates promised to solve all of the problems above, at the same time (with Babel and whatnot), and the era of mega-factories came to be.
Luckily nowadays we have standardize mostly around ES6+, and using ESM for imports/exports everywhere, so if you write plain JS and use ESM both in your code and in library code you don't need any more factories. You can still use a tool to bundle all your code, or to use more advanced coding paradigms like React*, but that's nowhere the peak of complexity we've lived.
That's one of the reasons I dislike TS BTW, because now that we are in "bliss plain JS" some people were not happy and had to add complex tooling again with TS.
*I draw the line here and declare that JSX is not JS, and thus this complexity thing doesn't apply there. If you are writing JSX you are writing it against CRA/Vite/Next, while plain JS you are writing it against the browser, so only things built on top of JSX, like TSX, can be considered factories from that point of view. If you think it's not fair, I'll argue it's as fair as JS, since in the end every browser is a "factory" of JS -> low-level code.