Yes. We've got an entire generation of front-end guys tooled up with awesome-looking IDEs and six hundred npm packages creating sites that need none of that. E

Yes. We've got an entire generation of front-end guys tooled up with awesome-looking IDEs and six hundred npm packages creating sites that need none of that. Each of these packages has dependencies, bugs, security issues, their own roadmaps, and so on. I believe in brutally low overhead websites, but I'd still use JQuery if I had to. It's one of a very few things that just make sense no matter what you're doing, and combined with CDNs and cache reloads, you're highly unlikely to be pulling even that 30k over the wire when you use it. We're going to make a ton of super-cool websites using the new stuff we have. Meanwhile we're also going to make a ton of messes. The cool kids will move on to more tools and gadgets. The second-string bunch will be left struggling to maintain. At some point there'll have to be a huge clean up. Consultants will make lots of money. Many of these consultants will be the people selling us all this crap we don't need right now. I wish this were some outlier story or a case of crotchety cynicism, but tech has been really consistent about repeating this pattern over and over again, sadly. We keep buying and using things based on the way we feel. Then they don't work out, people get frustrated, make an entirely new layer of stuff designed to make us feel good. Meanwhile, about 1-in-100 of these things turn out to be useful over longer periods of time. I'd give that award to JQuery.