You're absolutely right. Extensibility and minimizing cognitive overhead are imperative. What I found through my experience is that offering many hooks for ext

You're absolutely right. Extensibility and minimizing cognitive overhead are imperative. What I found through my experience is that offering many hooks for extensibility sometimes increased cognitive overhead for the team. With so many ways to accomplish a given task, no agreement on how to do it, and no guiding conventions, moving from one part of a repo to another can entail nontrivial cognitive overhead. Moving to a different project with a different collection of extensibility approaches employed for the minimal cognitive overhead of those authors sometimes compounds the problems. I've seen developers do things that were easy, obvious, and extensible to them but utterly incomprehensible for everyone else. Having the freedom to compose libraries as they saw fit may have made it more likely. Compare to Rails. For all its many, many warts and often exceptionally opinionated quirks, it's often relatively easy to move a junior or mid-level dev from one part of the codebase to another. Or one team to another. Or even one company to another. Many of the conventions are the same and the standards largely match, making onboarding easier. This can also make it easier for a random dev to predict how the system might be extended for a given task, easing maintenance over time. I think the core tradeoff here is between what minimizes overhead and cognitive costs for an individual and what is optimal for an organization. Also, I ran into issues with Clojure teams composing their own stacks and forgetting things like basic security measures of the sort that mature, pre-fab frameworks like Rails build in by default. They minimized the surface area so hard that they maximized the ignorance they exposed, producing services that couldn't be bothered use CSRF tokens because the developers had never heard of them. Again, I think you're right. It's about extensibility and cognitive overhead. I've just found there to be some nuance to what approach provides the best outcomes. I don't particularly enjoy being bossed around by a bucket of bits that tells me how I'm allowed to express my wishes, but I've found that my emotional experience of it isn't the important thing.