Seems like poor punishment to downvote Tom here. At the worst he made a blanket statement without backing it up, which is the exact same as what he was responding to.
> I think this is somewhat of a deceptive trap that people fall into. It's difficult to trial something like React unless you set up all the tooling around it, so Ember appears easier because it is blackboxed and sets things up for you.
> However, that means that six months in, when your app has outgrown the constraints of the blackboxed starter, you are trapped.
I have not seen a single company outgrow Ember-CLI. Imagine for a moment a big company with a huge app- Yahoo or LinkedIn or Twitch. These companies have apps that push the limits of Ember-CLI for sure, and have delved into the internals to add cutting edge features like lazy loading or optimized module loading, however none of them have abandoned it after six months.
Ember CLI has a public API for making changes to your build pipeline. Advanced users often reach for direct manipulation of Broccoli trees, another open source documented API with lots of example usage floating around. The "black box" referenced is non-existent. Ember-CLI is more like a car with a good manual. You don't need to understand fuel injection timing to get it out of the garage.
And Ember-CLI is fast. Out of the box it has great performance on Windows, Linux and OSX and there is even more room for improvement. Six months down the road, you will not find out it takes five seconds to rebuild your app. It will still be sub-second.
> it pays ridiculous dividends to understand the stack you're going to have to maintain for the next X years instead of having it hidden away from you.
We share software (proprietary or open) because it spreads the cost of maintenance. As a web developer I have plenty of work already, maintaining my own build pipeline is no more desirable than maintaining my own rendering engine or my own operating system. We always solve problems atop a certain level of abstraction.
Ember-CLI is the result of a concerted effort by individuals and the community that started in 2013. The project is clearly a massive success, demonstrated by its overwhelming adoption by Ember users (well over 90%, it isn't that popular because it sucks). It is a disservice to Ember-CLI to blow it off as "not scaling past six months" and to yourself as a developer to disregard Ember-CLI's hard-won lessons about how to build a good common build pipeline.
tl;dr please don't presume Ember-CLI is flawed because it "appears easy", making the hard look easy is a worthy goal.
[edit]: formatting :-p