[xgb84j]

Because in practice there is little value in making easier things easier. While 95% on the web are small projects, 95% of work is done on large projects.

Many developers also dislike using many different frameworks, because that would require more learning. If you have to choose one technology it's better to use one where you can do everything. Not one where you can do 95% really fast, but 5% not at all.

I personally always use "complex" frameworks like Angular or React because sooner or later feature requests come in, where those frameworks pay off. On average it saves time for me to always use those frameworks. That might be different for you depending on the work you do.

[squidbeak]

Do you have any data to support that 95% claim? As big as FAANG and other huge development teams are, it seems to me it's still only the tip of the pyramid, with the overwhelming majority of people in the industry working full time on small or midsized projects. It'd be interesting to see some concrete info on it.

[xgb84j]

The point where frameworks like Angular and React pay off and what I think of as complex projects are those where there is a some nontrivial feature. This coukd be a project with 1 developer working on it for 6 months.

For example a static page with a booking process with various entry points on the website, which slightly change the booking logic. Also you can book as a new user, as a logged in user, for somebody else etc. Also the logic is changing at regular intervals, because the business owner is trying different things out.

Using Angular with reactive forms makes this easier to develop, maintain and hand off to other Angular devs.

While it makes writing the static parts of the website more complicated, it makes developing the booking process easier. And overly complicated business processes are what is mentally challenging for me. This is where I want all the help I can get. Writing static pages is something I can do in any framework even when I am tired. Making this part easier or reducing boilerplate is nice but doesn't make me much happier. Being able to build ridiculously complicated forms without my head exploding does :) Of course if you work on projects with relatively straight forward requirements there is 0 advantage in using Angular or React for you. It always depends on the type of work you do.

[josephg]

I suspect even at Google a lot more than 5% of effort goes into small to midsized projects. Bazel, ninja, protobuf, grpc, the API documentation website for Gmail, VP9, the Google transcode api, takeout, various corp network tools & services and so on.

The big projects are of course important. But even chrome needs a simple little website with a download link.

[andybak]

The "big" projects can do what the hell they want. They can afford to throw a ton of money at a problem.

The small projects are where the people I care about are struggling.

[MrJohz]

Are people really struggling at that level, though? It has never been easier to write a complex page with minimal Javascript - there are more and more HTML elements that do what you expect (expandos and modals as some recent examples), Javascript is cleaner and more consistent across browsers (you really don't need jQuery anymore), and CSS is more powerful but also so much simpler (flex+grid solve so many problems).

Then if that's not enough, you've got things like HTMX if you're keen on doing everything in terms of html templating, you've got tools like Svelte if you want an isolated chunk of dynamic UI in a mostly static page, you've got bundlers like Vite that just work without any configuration if you get to the point where you need a build step, and you've got a multitude of lightweight frameworks for the next step.

And on top of that, pretty much all the old ways still work. The browser is an incredibly stable environment! Outside of a handful of security-related removals, if it got into a mainstream browser, without a feature flag or an explicit "experimental" warning, it's pretty much there for life. So if you want to go back to the old ways, there's not much stopping you - but a whole bunch of quality-of-life development improvements along the way to make things even easier than they were back then.

[ceuk]

Big project =/= Big company

e.g. WhatsApp back before the acquisition

Making it easier for people to build big, complex apps doesn't favour large organisations with lots of resources. The opposite in fact.

[iopq]

Smallest projects just throw up a bootstrap template and call it a day

something like this: https://www.hotelpalacebarcelona.com/

they don't care it's not "html first"

[RunSet]

> If you have to choose one technology it's better to use one where you can do everything. Not one where you can do 95% really fast, but 5% not at all.

> I personally always use "complex" frameworks like Angular or React because sooner or later feature requests come in, where those frameworks pay off. On average it saves time for me to always use those frameworks.

I wonder whether they ever pay off. First, I don't believe the frameworks you mention really, as you suggest, enable the last 5% of functionality that would otherwise be impossible. No, those frameworks are written in the same language they work in, which means that strictly speaking they do not enable any new functionality.

Second, whatever ease / speed of development you use must be weighed against the additional cost borne by the project's users. The time you save (that you might otherwise spend learning to achieve the same result without the framework) could be less than the time spent collectively by users waiting for the framework to load.

[codeptualize]

This. Even for basic websites you benefit from some form of templating/components for example to get the nav & footer on each page.

[timeon]

Even basic websites? It is developer vs user then.

I think otherwise. I.e.: blog shouldn't be web app just because it's content management is.

[zilti]

You don't need a frontend framework for that. Fuck people who do. They're the reason most websites are slow as molasses on my three year old phone, despite them being very basic sites. Just stuffed to the brim with unnecessary bullshit.

[up2isomorphism]

“95% work is done on large project” this perception might just because you have chosen complex frameworks. Remember google and facebook starts with no frameworks at all. Are they small projects? No.