Comment by stephenr

I mean, that much is obvious just based on casual reading of a few articles/discussions about "modern" front-end dev.

I am 100% convinced that "Modern" front end developers are in fact, afraid of CSS and HTML. Like, "it will steal my eyeballs and look back at my face with them" scared.

Nothing else explains things like this, tailwind, JSX components, etc. Nothing. There is no explanation besides absolute morbid fear of the underlying technology - because the browser support has improved immensely but apparently they're all deathly scared of using it.

Before you tell me that I don't know what challenges these problems solve: I was primarily doing front-end development.... 20ish years ago. One of my first jobs in the space was adapting the client side code for a J2EE app - mostly this meant removing an IKEA worth of tables and using CSS - in IE6 of all fucking things. Subsequently I created reusable UI frontend components (i.e. output some HTML, maybe this little bit of corresponding JS, you'll get a usable interactive components in a browser) for two different organisations.

I have said it before and I'll say it again. I think JavaScript developers heard about (or saw over someone's shoulder) how J2EE guys had ant/etc build toolchains, and had abstraction like FactoryFactoryImplementationFactoryBuilderFactory and said HEY THAT LOOKS COOL, and if it's harder to understand they can't fire me!!

It's like NIH syndrome but for an entire community of people whose primary goal is chasing the shiny, followed closely by resume padding.