Learning web development used to be fun until around 2015/2016, when the curse, known as JavaScript frameworks, and framework-esque frontend libraries like ReactJS began gaining traction.
Google had earlier created AngularJS in 2009 and released it in 2010, but in 2016, Google released a complete rewrite of the AngularJS Framework. This led to breaking changes and a complete approach to how things are done. There was no backward compatibility and developers had to relearn a lot of fundamental concepts in order to keep up with this new change.
Fastforward to the year 2025, we now have over a hundred of these JS Frameworks and Frontend Libraries.
Web development stopped being about building websites to solve actual problems, but started being about chasing frameworks to solve the problem the previous version of a framework introduced.
You know the saddest part? These changes are often breaking changes, and are not cross-compatible with the legacy versions of the same Framework. Another sad aspect is the very short duration between these updates.
A new JavaScript tool drops. It’s smaller, faster, and claims to fix everything that came before it. Devs rush in. Blogs are written. Tutorials go live. Talks are given. And companies? They hesitate because they have real users and production apps that need to stay up.
Before you know it, the same tool that promised simplicity increasingly becomes more complex, grows in dependencies, and breaking changes starts to creep in.
It starts looking like the exact thing it tried to replace. The hype fades. Another one enters the scene. The cycle repeats.
Even Vue, which I once thought was the sane alternative, eventually gave in. Vue 3 brought a new API, broke a lot of things from Vue 2, and made teams rewrite or relearn just to keep up. And that’s if the libraries their project depended on even survives the upgrade.
Developers now spend more time jumping from one tool to the next than building real things. They know a bit of everything and master nothing. The focus has shifted from solving actual problems to keeping up appearances in a fast-moving ecosystem.
We don’t need more frameworks. Lets learn a thing or two from the evolution of HTML, CSS and Vanilla Javascript.
If that sounds boring, maybe boring is what we need.
Javascript Frameworks were a curse to website development.
