Is there any reason to keep complaining about javascript fatigue in 2017?

tldr;
No.

This short article is my personal opinion about this thread on Hacker News.

Reading through it I’ve seen repeating comments about current JavaScript fatigue or how messy js as a language is.

In my opinion the developers themselves are the cause of such state.

Everyone seems frustrated that they all have to use some weird multi-level abstraction tools to deal with web front-end development.

But the truth is that they don’t have to.

They don’t have to use webpack and Babel.

They don’t have to write code in ES6+.

They don’t have to use Vue.js / React.js / Angular.js / Backbone.js / Ember.js.

They don’t have to use CSS modules or PostCSS (or any other fancy / weird CSS-related stuff).

But they should always choose best tool for the job  -  and trust me  - very often stuff above won’t be necessary.

5 years ago there were also rich web applications (a.k.a. today’s SPAs), but they wasn’t built on top of such monolith tools.

In almost every projects that I had pleasure to work with as a freelancer, there was just jQuery and couple other js plugins as a main stack. And codebase of these apps is maintanable and still clear today.

Additionaly, after speaking with couple fellow front-end developers I’ve found a pattern, that most of those who complain most about classic approach of front-end development are unable to design proper app architecture by themselves  - they need clear frames HOW-TO build something  -  which is very often provided by X or Y framework guides.

So don’t be harsh to yourself  -  if You don’t want to work with React / Webpack / Babel / shinyFancyHypedFrameworkOrToolNameHere - just don’t use it.

-- ł.

This is a re-post - it was originialy posted on my previous blog at 14/05/2017.