It finally crystallised, after all these years. I now understand my groundhog day experience of being the first person to take traces for a high-profile service, or to read the JS a tower of bundlers and build tools "optimised": the JS community (principally the Over-Reactors) are theorists.
Web Application Theorists.
WATs.
They do not understand how it's going because *looking* is discouraged. These are not engineers. They do not engineer because they don't accept constraints as legitimate.
@slightlyoff Something that is worth noting here is that the original community around Node.js and npm very much were the "grime-under-their-fingernails" developers just wanting to try new things, throwing them away and trying again if they didn't work out or weren't compatible with reality.
And then the hype cycle started, the Silicon Valley startups rolled in, and those folks effectively got displaced from the community by WATs. The ecosystem gentrified, essentially.
