I don’t think this is a truly irreconcilable stance and I don’t think it’s exclusive to frontend, you run into it up and down the stack. I think there are two

I don’t think this is a truly irreconcilable stance and I don’t think it’s exclusive to frontend, you run into it up and down the stack. I think there are two approaches to software development, and a gradient of people transitioning between them: (1) I’m responsible for this system and I either have to understand this well enough to feel comfortable being directly responsible for it or delegate responsibility through my org structure or vendor contracts. (2) I don’t understand how any of this works, it’s just a bunch of magical incantations that get me results, and one incantation is interchangeable with another. Your dumbdumb fake engineer isn’t a fair characterization of (2) but I do believe a lot of tools in a lot of ecosystems are optimized for engineers without the depth of knowledge necessary to operate them under the API contract. That’s totally fine when that API contract is provided by a responsible party you can delegate responsibility to. The problem comes in when you provide these “simple” API contracts on top of extremely complex internals and hand them to a developer/user who is ultimately responsible for the entire stack, internals and all. In some cases (2) can offset risk using a “cattle” approach where multiple live versions of the system are kept up, changes happen one at a time, and you can fail over if something goes wrong and throw away the old state. I’ve met engineers who operate K8S clusters this way. They are clearly out of their depth with kubernetes, but they can fail over to a secondary and rebootstrap a bad cluster from scratch to get back to a good state. By keeping things disposable you exclude most (all?) failure modes other than “poison pill” bugs that repeatedly put your system into a bad state. But, for the most part, these complex open source systems that try to hide complex internals give the illusion of delegating responsibility. You might get pretty far before an incident comes knocking and it’s time to pay the toll.