Is it just me, or has modern web development become a competition of who can install the most external dependencies?
I see so many beginners pulling in massive third-party tools and complex templates for a basic CRUD app. Whatever happened to writing clean native logic and letting the browser do its job? Templates make you fast initially, but understanding how things work under the hood is what actually makes you a good developer.
What is one popular library or framework you think is completely overrated and bloated? Let's talk.
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It’s a abstraction ladder. Decades ago, developers asked if using high-level languages like C instead of Assembly was 'real programming.' This is just the next iteration of that debate.
This is exactly why bundle size optimization and tree-shaking have become such critical skills. Half of modern web dev is trying to un-stitch the bloated parts we didn't actually need.
Try building a modern web app entirely from scratch with vanilla JS and native APIs. You'll quickly realize why we use packages—the web has grown too complex for one person to reinvent every wheel.
We are definitely building apps, but the nature of the building has changed. The engineering today is in system integration, security auditing, and performance optimization of those stitched parts.
If you're building a business, stitching packages is the smartest way to validate an MVP. Clients pay for features and speed to market, not how elegantly you rewrote a utility function from scratch.
The real issue arises when a single package breaks due to an unmaintained sub-dependency. Left-pad proved how fragile this 'stitching' culture can be.
I think of it like building a house. Pre-fab walls and standard bricks (npm packages) let us focus on architecture, interior design, and layout. We don’t need to smelt our own nails to call ourselves builders.
There’s a fine line between efficiency and over-reliance. Using a package for authentication makes perfect sense; installing a package just to pad a string or format a date is where we went wrong.
Honestly, sometimes it feels like my primary job title should be 'Dependency Manager' rather than Software Engineer. If npm goes down, half the tech industry pauses.
Vijay Bhalae
Great point. I always try to challenge myself: if a package is under 50 lines of code, I write it myself. It saves a lot of dependency hell down the road.