[fnky]

Most of the things I've seen people complain about being complex seems to be a lack of either understanding, proper tooling and in most times, the codebase itself.

Newer technology usually adds a ton of different patterns and abstractions that can hide a lot of things away from you, so it becomes hard to understand, unless this information is presented as a 101, or you invest all your time to read documentation about each individual part of everything. Which, to be frank, nobody has time for.

I have used GraphQL with Apollo and React for the last couple of years for different kinds of projects and what I have noticed is that the tools themselves, while quite abstracted, also try to support a lot of edge cases which can make it hard to apply to your project. I had to either use other libraries or build my own that helped me abstract some of the things that were most commonplace but required a lot of boilerplate otherwise.

I have found tremendous value by following the philosophy of not to pre-optimize for everything, until it becomes a burden to work with. Although, it can be hard to determine when something is going to become so big that it will be difficult if not impossible to refactor, but you learn that as you go.