I understand that this is intended as a rant - but these types of “case studies”, where someone starts a personal hobby project as a solo developer without using modern frameworks - are not very convincing. It would be an entirely different argument to point to a blog post of a larger organisation justifying their tech stack than these types of sources, that seem to be more common these days. Often the author is a backend developer who lacks any detailed knowledge of the problem space, and the comments section is usually full of fact errors and confusion.
I don't get the impression the author (of this post, or most others like it) is saying this approach should necessarily be used for complex apps in large organizations. The opposite, rather; that when working solo on hobby projects, modern frameworks are often unnecessary, and foregoing them can be more fun and productive than one might expect.
The "detailed knowledge of the problem space" appears to me to be "detailed knowledge of the hammers in use", not necessarily the problems these hammers once solved.
Often I find that the common web app needs nothing more than a few dozen helper js functions.
Having done back and and front end, I’m fully convinced that the frameworks are there only to help mediate a large team of developers all fiddling with the same codebase.
I haven’t been working on any sort of crazy features with elements moving around the page or excessive Ajax components (do they still call it that!?). On the other hand, most sites don’t have these features.
> Having done back and and front end, I’m fully convinced that the frameworks are there only to help mediate a large team of developers all fiddling with the same codebase.
I agree. A framework forces a shared consensus on how to solve a particular set of problems.
A single competent engineer on their own can make that consensus themselves. If the system is larger than a single competent engineer can manage, it seems intuitive that a small handful of engineers who are familiar with working with each other are less dependent on a framework for shared consensus.
It's a blog. Not everything has to be communicated through a polished and organized corporate machine.
Requiring a company to tell you whether you’re having fun or not is certainly a take.