It's because big companies are optimised specifically for this. The entire enterprise dev culture is built around it. If you have to actually code, some devs a

It's because big companies are optimised specifically for this. The entire enterprise dev culture is built around it. If you have to actually code, some devs are going to 10x other ones. But if you stack in as many dependencies as you can to the point where everyone is just reading documentation trying to get caught up, and the entire measure of productivity is whether you've used a library before so you come into a project with it's API pre-memorised, all devs look the same. Any dipshit can look at a few code examples and copy the basic patterns out of them. It's literally impossible to gain any real expertise in these codebases. I've been using React since 2015. I've got more specific experience in React front-ends than basically anyone I've ever worked with. I've run into virtually every NPM library in the ecosystem at least once over that time. It doesn't matter. I've forgotten 90% of the interesting details in all of them except for a small handful that I truly believe are quality. I can write some basic code using whatever from memory, but as soon as you hit anything with any real complexity it's back to the docs and back to trawling Github issues for everything that's not in the docs. You're in the same boat as everyone else, grinding out a scrap of knowledge just to abandon it at the start of the next project when you find out that there's a new set of fad dependencies you need to learn the internals of because their abstractions leak like a sieve. This works for big companies because they can afford the severe productivity hit with their momentum and market dominance. It's a death sentence for startups though. That's why everyone hires 20 year olds to run their startups. You might leave a ton of great experienced candidates on the table, but you dodge all their colleagues that have spent 20 years learning how to fuck everything up and get away with it because their individual contribution has always been indistinguishable in the company's revenue.