Why the shit is WebDev getting so complicated? It’s like everyone is just trying to show how smart they are instead of finding the simplest way to solve a problem. Or maybe I’m just too dumb to figure out what all this new shit does.

@Torbuntu You got to be joking. Pure vanilla JS will get you an unmanageable mess of spaghetti as soon as your app gets any bigger.

Stuff like react, redux, MobX and so on make you're life much easier if you know how to use them.

Let's take a simple problem, reflecting your data to the DOM. With vanilla js you're writing piles of code trying to keep it all in sync, with react you can do it with quite little and it works reliably.

Another problem that everyone moans about: browser support. Not a thing when you use Webpack, Babel and postcss.

Or the thing everyone likes to moan about in JS, weak typing. Flow.js or typescript solves that.

Do these things take time to learn? Yes
Does it pay off to learn them? Absolutely.

Also, web isn't going anywhere. JS even less so. In the long term, of you want a job in this field, you need to know these things. A well paying job at least

@Froot JS will die when web assembly becomes mainstream. Won't happen fast, but it will definitely happen.

Then we can avoid that whole compile to js mess.

@Froot you have a point and I won’t say that absolutely everything is a hot mess. Like you mentioned things like React are great when you have large applications that need to handle state and are in general difficult to keep in your head all at once. The problem is really the hyper complex tooling setup for even the most simple applications.

I find that people are very much against using older simpler tools to create simple applications and instead opt for the newest and most poorly documented package just because it’s cool. I have always been a fan of using the right tool for the job. I agree that writing pure vanilla js is just too much effort sometimes, but you don’t really need to setup React and redux with thunk and Babel, when you are making a static site that will essentially display a few images in a gallery and some text.

@Torbuntu It makes life easier like c++ makes life easier as opposed to assembly

@IamGoD Wrong. Web assembly is not suited for "every day stuff" like manipulating DOM or making Ajax requests. In fact, it can't do those things, it's sandboxed. What web assembly is really for is heavy computation. So it's more like an add-on to JS than a replacement. JS will still be controlling the overall process.

@twosliced Absolutely. Horses for courses. However I'd like to add that setting all that up takes very little time once you've done it a couple of times. All these tools use convenient config files that you can reuse. So you can basically set up some project startup files that you just copy into new projects, hit "npm install" and you're going.

I'm actually planning to write some tooling for myself for exactly that purpose. Something like a starter kit that gives me stuff like ESLint, Flow.js, Jest and Babel easily and quickly.