[atonparker]

This article mostly seems to be saying "my problems don't require your solutions". So don't use them. We all know jQuery still works.

A more charitable reading would be "don't use complex tools to solve simple problems". That's a fine piece of advice when your problems are simple. Simple problems rarely stay that way. Most of these articles lamenting the state of front end development make a similar concession:

If I see a section on my app that is really hard to with Pjax/Turbolinks and jQuery, I’ll bring in a library/framework like Vue.js, React, Angular. All good choices for doing really complex forms(although I find Angular to be the best at this), with a ton of conditional validation. You know what though, these are the outliers in my experience, not the norm.

Sure, adding a form to your front page can be done with a couple lines of vanilla javascript. But you suffer the cost of a framework or library at the start of a project because it pays dividends at the end of a project. When you have to filter a list of ten thousand items as the user types, you'll probably wish you could use virtual DOM diffing. When you have to step through a series of ten asynchronous requests before updating a view, you'll probably wish you could use async/await. When your site takes five seconds to load over 3G because of your single monolithic codebase, you'll probably wish you could tree-shake your dependencies. The tools mocked by the author have real uses, he just refuses to see them.

[possibleNoob]

What is tree shake your dependencies?

[atonparker]

Something like http://rollupjs.org which statically analyzes your ES6 dependency graph and creates a bundle with only the parts you need. The author included an image that rips at ES6 syntax, including the new import statements. A tool like Rollup couldn't work with dynamic exports like `module.exports = foobar`.