No offense taken. As a fellow old person (whose first computer as a young kid was a TI-99/4A) I definitely feel this pain. But because I am also an old enginee

No offense taken. As a fellow old person (whose first computer as a young kid was a TI-99/4A) I definitely feel this pain. But because I am also an old engineer who works with a lot of other old engineers we are lucky to have a shocking number of human-years’ accumulated experience not only selecting a pile of tools and frameworks but also sticking with them from zero to $BIGCO. Put another way, I’ve shot myself in the foot more times than I can count with these tools and I do it less often and in more esoteric ways these days. I can’t claim the same degree of experience with all these tools, of course. Pyright is bleeding edge. Tailwind is still the new kid. Relative to (say) Python and Django or Flask, React is new too. Most of the pain and learnings come from these newer moving parts. Is it “better”? That depends on the axes of evaluation. As a startup studio where the 70% case might be “SaaS that takes a back-office process held together today by Excel & email and makes it way better” the answer is: sometimes, unequivocally yes. Not just because of the tools and the potential velocity they can confer, but because of the kinds of teams we can build around them. Sometimes, plain old Django with nothing added is a clearly better choice. In the end, every startup is its own snowflake. We try to select “starter stacks” that balance industry familiarity with our ability to offer meaningful operational perspective. We definitely don’t think of them as the final world.