> And then all of a sudden, everything starts changing. Nobody wants to hire a vanilla JS/HTML developer anymore, they want react developers. And these react kiddies are able to put together a webapp that looks so much nicer, has more functionality, and they are able to do it in less time.
Don't want to support the author, but I want to say this has not been my experience. It seems to me that for most types of web pages web development is slower than in the old days. HTML and JQuery were really good for what were mostly static pages with a small amount of logic and state which is still what most web pages are.
However feature rich applications were a mess using older tools. Code organization was difficult and you had almost no hope of keeping complex state lined up in the UI, React has been a godsend for this kind of work.
But developers as a whole are very junior (iirc as of this year the median dev has 4 years of experience) and I think most can't pick which tools suit their use case.
Don't want to support the author, but I want to say this has not been my experience. It seems to me that for most types of web pages web development is slower than in the old days. HTML and JQuery were really good for what were mostly static pages with a small amount of logic and state which is still what most web pages are.
However feature rich applications were a mess using older tools. Code organization was difficult and you had almost no hope of keeping complex state lined up in the UI, React has been a godsend for this kind of work.
But developers as a whole are very junior (iirc as of this year the median dev has 4 years of experience) and I think most can't pick which tools suit their use case.