> Because things are getting more complicated under the hood but seem "easier" to understand (because we're adding piles of abstractions on top of piles of abst

> Because things are getting more complicated under the hood but seem "easier" to understand (because we're adding piles of abstractions on top of piles of abstractions), fewer people tend to take the time to create things with the "old" technos and really learn how things works. That isn't necessarily true. I suspect the same number of people are taking time to really learn how things work, but the abstractions are allowing more people to get involved in writing and contributing to open-source software, developing services, etc., so the apparent fraction of people doing stuff on their own is lower. But if it weren't for the abstractions, it's not that we'd have more people doing things under the hood, it's that we'd have people not doing them at all. I'm one of the folks who insists on knowing how things work under the hood, and it's an enormously valuable (and fun) professional skill, but it also frankly limits what I can do. I won't write projects in React because I don't really understand what React is doing and I don't feel comfortable with that, so my dashboards are cronjobs that template out some HTML and upload it to static hosting. (Which is fine, my job isn't making dashboards, my job is debugging prod systems.) Meanwhile my coworkers are throwing together incredibly impressive UIs very quickly. If it weren't for React, neither of us would be writing these UIs. I remember open-source development in the pre-GitHub days. There was, frankly, a whole lot less of it.