[coffeecloud]

In 1 year I can stand up a system big enough that it would require 2 engineers to manage its ongoing maintenance, feature requests, bug fixes, 3rd party API updates, etc

More software requires more software engineers to maintain it, who then write more software, which then require more engineers to maintain it, on and on and on…

[thr0w]

And you would've needed 4 engineers to build your in-house payment and fulfillment systems, except now you just pay Stripe and Shopify.

Oh, and 1 of those engineers is a "React engineer", who operates purely at the level of that framework, following boilerplate and documentation like a cook book, who would've otherwise been left out of the industry altogether but is now delivering as much value as someone who put in the work to understand JS, single-threaded UI, web browsers, network protocols...