Comment by torginus

Sorry by, JWT, I meant the middleware that integrates the crypto nto my web server (pretty sure even Claude doesn't attempt to do hand-rolled crypto, thankfully).

That express middleware library has a ton of config options that were quite the headache to understand, and I realized that it's basically a couple hundred line skeleton that I spent more time customizing than it'd have taken from scratch.

As for old JS vs new JS - I have worked more in the enterprise world before, working with stuff like ASP.NET in that era.

Let me tell you a story - way back when I needed to change how a particular bit of configuration was read at startup in the ASP.NET server. I was astonished to find that the config logic (which was essentially just binding data from env vars and json to objects), was thousands upon thousands of lines of code, with a deep inheritance chain and probably an UML diagram that could've covered a football field.

I am super glad that that kind of software engineering lost out to simple and sensible solutions in the JS ecosystem. I am less glad that that simplicity is obscured and the first instinct of many JS devs is to reach for a package instead of understanding how the underlying system works, and how to extend it.

Which tbf is not their fault - even if simplicity exists, people still assume (I certainly did) that that JWT middleware library was a substantial piece of engineering, when it wasn't.