big question that's been popping through my head recently is:
so we're acknowledging that the obsession with DX has been a driving force behind the JS industrial complex or whatever, and the increasing bloat of webapps at the expense of users.
But should we put some of the blame on the web platform itself for not centering DX in such a way that doing the right thing is, in fact, most easily done through native APIs and plain HTML/CSS? Are web standards still moving too slow on that front? Are they still a bit too gun-shy?
Dumping responsibility on developers for trying to make their own lives easier when the tools you give them by default, as good as they are, still require them to jump through some hoops to do the right thing, seems like a losing strategy in the long run, no?
I've been having a lot of fun relearning and reevaluating a lot of my assumptions around web dev, but it's been a lot of work and there's really not a lot of easy, centralized education/documentation on how to put all these disparate pieces together into something cohesive. I just kinda have a bunch of lego blocks that got dumped in front of me and told to make a fancy, progressively enhanced, low-JS MOC millenium falcon out of it.
And I'm JS/TS developer with 15+ years of experience who works in FAANG and is really passionate about this stuff. I don't think I'd be able/willing to do all this otherwise.
Maybe the answer to everything here isn't really "the web sucks at DX", because it genuinely, truly, honestly has been making enormous strides in that aspect, but "we need better education/documentation on how to develop things end-to-end"
MDN actually does a really good job of this! But maybe we need more focused guides that are less technology-centered and more task/application-shape-oriented.
@zkat This has been bothering me ever since the "stop using W3Schools" campaign from many years ago. I've talked to a lot of proponents from that campaign - none of them were willing to acknowledge that MDN just wasn't good/accessible enough (especially at the time!), nor able to provide better alternatives with similar accessibility.
This is a long-standing problem, IMO, and while the "JS industrial complex" has definitely been sabotaging education as you mention, this problem does precede that - just back then it was a horde of nerds going "if you don't understand MDN then the problem must be with you, get good". Causes have changed, problem has remained...
