To me, the awkward "is this funny or not" approach to writing this article fits in perfectly with the sentiment of the author (and my own) about the subject. I

To me, the awkward "is this funny or not" approach to writing this article fits in perfectly with the sentiment of the author (and my own) about the subject. In my 18 years as a web dev I've tumbled down every rabbit hole and been caught by every trap ever. We wanted animation? Great, learn some ActionScript. Now you want databases? Add some MySQL and PHP. But then those weren't cool anymore and everything had to be RoR and jQuery. Then we ended up writing monsters of jQuery code trying to make sites feature packed and along came Backbone. After that there was Angular, but then people realized SEO and accessibility still need to be considered so now I spend my days writing what should have been as simple as: <h1>Hello World</h1> Like this: React.createElement( 'h1', {}, 'Hello World' ); So the solution to HTML is now to simply give up on HTML and write everything in JavaScript… I like React, Redux, Node, etc a lot. The fact we can have Universal and Native React and that there finally is a robust solution to most ( all? ) web dev problems is fantastic. But the overhead in development time is significant. When possible I use these tools, but in a lot of cases, I just give up on it all and end up writing straight up HTML divs without any flexboxes or animations or shivs or shims or 5's or 3's. Just the good old stuff I was writing back in 1998. When comparing web development to something like developing for iOS, this full circle we've made does feel painful ironic. So much so it's hard to tell if it's funny or not. Small note to the author : love the beautiful big font on your site but you have some colliding elements on iPad portrait.