Productivity always has side effects, and usually that comes in the form of abstracting away the plumbing to "ship stuff". For lots of working developers out t

Productivity always has side effects, and usually that comes in the form of abstracting away the plumbing to "ship stuff". For lots of working developers out there, "ship stuff" is their job, and you can't expect every single dev to understand the stack they work in end-to-end and to build their own plumbing each time, just for the sake of some ideal of knowledge. It's a straw man to say that frameworks "lower code quality standards". I would argue in a lot of cases it's the opposite and they help codify best practices for the 80% of web applications that are the same, instead of everyone having their own custom implementations of templating, event handling, auth, caching, etc... Would you rather have journeyman programmers building crappy templates and inefficient controller logic, or crappy auth systems and slow storage layers? Frameworks provide guard rails and let less skilled developers be more productive as they get better over time. One can hope that some will dig in under the hood to learn more, but if they don't, so be it. At least they're not building your auth system or rolling their own hashing libraries.