This is the case at many teams in almost all companies. One sad reality is people want to keep their jobs and so they tend to inflate stacks and codebases so much so that they can "keep working on things" for a long long time.
Sorry to hear your situation but I found there's hardly any point in debating with your team on moving towards simplicity - just better to keep your head down and take that paycheck every 2 weeks.
My goal is to build a microstartup with a small team - and for that I am definitely going to choose the traditional JQuery/HTMX/Turbo setup with a server that renders templates. To hell with React.
I understand your perspective. It's similar to AWS services like CloudFront, API Gateway, SQS, and Lambdas—all designed for a microservice architecture that may not be necessary if scaling isn't a priority. The same applies to frameworks and libraries such as Next.js, and even React, Vue, or Angular, in my opinion. Most products and companies are not on the scale of Netflix, Spotify, or Facebook.
This leads me to question why people still use jQuery instead of native JavaScript. From my understanding, jQuery primarily serves as a polyfill. So why jQuery and not native Javascript?
> This leads me to question why people still use jQuery instead of native JavaScript.
Most cases because it is not worth the refactoring to remove jQuery and in a few cases when it is in new project is because the person coding doesn't know to code without it.
I don't mind adding that 200kb of bundle size, and I'm one of the peeps that feel Jquery is easier to read and less code to write. Just me opinion
I just saw someone put an expensive cloud API management product in between the Angular and API parts of a tiny monolith app.
Not even a shared API management service — dedicated to the app!
It’s insanity.
Good luck hiring people that will agree to that.