I'm I becoming a dinosaur? Back in the days when I started programming, I used to get excited about new libraries and frameworks and was eager to learn them.
I recall how Angular was the hot new thing and SPAs were popping up everywhere. A friend showed me Laravel and my eyes were round with awe. I recall spending so many hours trying (unsuccessfully) to setup a Django project. I recall Flask, and how I pored over everything that Manuel Grinberg wrote and the speeches he gave (they were pretty good resources). There was also a period where I was learning twisted (the python framework) but it twisted my brain instead.
Now I feel uninterested in any of those things. I barely reach for frameworks in my work. They feel like an impedance. I get surprised (and not in a good way) when I see people praising react and tailwind.css.
Vanilla JS has come so far. It can do what I want it to do and very quickly at that, if I put some thought into performance. Same for PHP and Python. Sass/Scss allows you to overcome some of the pains of writing CSS, sometimes making the process very enjoyable. Async/await has brought concurrency to the masses in the languages that have them. Fundamental understanding of software architecture, User Experience and data structures gives you more control over the software than any of these frameworks and libraries.
Over the years, my mind has come to associate frameworks with one thing: restrictions. Whenever using a framework, I quickly find myself at the very edge of the framework. That fragile, breaking point of the framework. You know, that very obscure, possibly undocumented feature which allows you to reach out for some of the raw power of the underlying language but makes your code look terrible and not much like slick examples.
Why learn React or any of those frameworks and libraries for that matter? Simple answer: jobs. It is almost impossible to find a frontend job advert looking for someone with a good foundation in vanilla JS. Most jobs I see are looking for a 'React dev', as if 'React' was something that exists outside JavaScript. Here is the thing, I don't know react because I haven't ever felt the need for it. Spending time thinking about user experience and the flow of actions through the software has occupied my thinking instead but here I am, looking to learn React and tailwind.css, even though I don't need them. The thought gives me unpleasant feelings. Maybe I've become a dinosaur.