As many others below, I can also say I sympathise and often feel the same. As you said, everything feels super fragile and held together with only duct tape. W

As many others below, I can also say I sympathise and often feel the same. As you said, everything feels super fragile and held together with only duct tape. Why is it so? I believe because everything started switching to web lately so it gained a lot of focus. Being open-source in nature it attracted a lot of new ideas and this is what lead us to the influx of new frameworks we have today. It is a good thing because innovation->improvement, but also a bad thing because a huge mess and choice paralysis :D. I also feel overwhelmed with all the transpiler and compilation steps, pretty much gave up on understanding everything. How to hate it less? What @valand suggested below makes sense to me, by focusing less on the technology and its brokeness, but rather on the product, best practices and the end-goal. Also, even if the build system is a mess we can still write clean, high-quality and tested code which can be reused. This is what we did, propagated this culture through the team and that helped me hate things less. We were reading engineering books, having clean code dojos, best practice presentations etc. My takeaway from that was choose your victories when you can have them and enjoy them. Another approach would be to join the madness by creating your own solution - which is what I also did. I know it is a https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ case, but it was too fun and interesting so I couldn't help it :) We basically built a DSL that compiles to the underlying stack of choice. If somebody wants to give it a look it is here: https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp Good luck and hope you find peace with whatever you choose!