Yeah, but then people started building bloated static websites with those libraries instead of using a saner template engine + javascript approach which is fast, easy to cache, debug, and has stellar performance and SEO.
Little it helped that even React developers were saying that it was the wrong tool for plenty use cases.
Worst of all?
The entire nuance of choosing the right tool for the job has been long lost on most developers. Even the comments I read on HN make me question where the engineering part of the job starts.
It also doesn't help that non-technical stakeholders sometimes want a say in a tech stack conversation as well. I've been at more than one company where either the product team or the acquiring firm wanted us to migrate away from a tried and true Rails setup to a fullstack JS platform simply because they either wanted the UI development flexibility or to not have to hire Ruby devs.
Non-technical MBA's seem to have a hard time grasping that a JS-only platform is not a panacea and comes with serious tradeoffs.
Little it helped that even React developers were saying that it was the wrong tool for plenty use cases.
Worst of all?
The entire nuance of choosing the right tool for the job has been long lost on most developers. Even the comments I read on HN make me question where the engineering part of the job starts.