>I spent a yea rdoing a lot of intensive React + Electron + D3 + MobX in 2018 Right, and that code still runs and compiles exactly as it did then, correct? Th

>I spent a yea rdoing a lot of intensive React + Electron + D3 + MobX in 2018 Right, and that code still runs and compiles exactly as it did then, correct? The fact that other tools move on doesn't mean you have to. Actually, out of what you just said, D3, MobX, and React all have not removed any of the APIs you could've used back in 2018. Did people maybe rewrite some tools to support hooks, and in doing so find that hooks were a more concise and readable solution? Yeah, they did, so we moved to hooks. > a year spent just writing and learning good software in Python gains me so much more transferable skills to anything I touch as a software engineer in the future How so? This is a complete non-sequitur. If you consider data science / ML to be the entirety of software engineering, then maybe you have a point, but since you even put (for example) beside Python it just looks to me like you hate JS and will pretend it's not software engineering so you can avoid it. Any time you've spent tweaking build systems or updating libraries for no reason is on you, not on JS.