For a while, it felt like every day, a new JavaScript framework was announced. From Svelte stealing React’s thunder to Solid promising revolutionary performance, and Qwik reimagining how web apps load - all of these promise to be blazing fast and better than anything that came before.
As a developer trying to keep up with the latest tech, you find yourself in a familiar loop: check the landing page, watch the demo, star the GitHub repo “just in case,” and move on with your life. There’s only so much mental bandwidth to go around.
Or maybe you react differently. Maybe you feel offended to the bone that this new generation of developers is just running in circles, reinventing what PHP or JSP could do 15 years ago. You go on HackerNews and rant about framework-of-the-day and how everyone is wasting your time.
The criticisms aren’t baseless. Each new framework adds complexity to the ecosystem. Bundle sizes grow, build tools multiply, and learning curves get steeper. The JavaScript community’s tendency to reinvent rather than refine existing solutions has real costs.
But technical arguments only tell part of the story. Why do these discussions get so heated? Why does framework fatigue trigger such visceral reactions?
How dare you make me learn something new, when the old thing was perfectly decent? — (probably) a top level comment on HackerNews
After years of observing these cycles, I think it comes down to one word: employability.
Developers want to keep getting paid for what they already know and use. We worry that today’s optional technology will become tomorrow’s job requirement. That fear isn’t irrational - look at job boards today and count how many React positions you see compared to jQuery.
It is true you can still make a web page using Notepad, but it would be very hard to get anyone to pay for it.
Reframing the framework discussion from purely technical to an employability made all those angry comments make a lot more sense to me.
Outrage is self defense. But once we understand what we’re really defending against, we can have more productive conversations about how our industry evolves.