Comment by throwanem

I said "empire builders," not "engineers." Nor did I say "held hostage."

My perspective on this is that of a working engineer who made a deliberate choice, now nearly 15 years ago, to avoid ending up stuck in the same decreasing-radius career spiral I saw Rails leading me toward - so I went and did some other things, then spent a decade building modern TypeScript instead, mostly on Kubernetes, without losing the ability to knock out a quick one-off script or architect a system top to bottom as I need. It's worked out splendidly for me! I suppose I might have done as well if I decided differently, but I admit I don't see how.