From my Java days, backend work looked like creating plugins to auto-generate XML, which would be parsed by the build system to auto-generate classes...on a phi

From my Java days, backend work looked like creating plugins to auto-generate XML, which would be parsed by the build system to auto-generate classes...on a philosophy level, I can't remember people preaching simplicity and pragmatism outside of the Eclipse people (who had to deal with real hard complexity issues day in and day out...) An alternative history where Java would have been huge on the desktop doesn't look to me like we'd have a heaven of well-though lightweight apps TBH. I personnally think npm is something inevitable, and am not sure Maven for instance is fundamentally better in the grand scheme of things (I'd argue as a dev it's way more of a PITA without any specific upside, but it might be my own incompetence).