It's downstream of a cultural difference. JS devs aren't as obsessed with their software ecosystem as PHP or Ruby devs. You can put all species of tech worker

It's downstream of a cultural difference. JS devs aren't as obsessed with their software ecosystem as PHP or Ruby devs. You can put all species of tech worker on a spectrum of more to less ecosystem-focused. At the extreme end you have, like, OpenBSD "sysadmins" who are more hardcore than most actual programmers, who do everything in KSH and C and try to avoid installing new packages to their boxes if at all possible. Most backend-first programming languages are around the middle of this spectrum. And most frontend developers are on the other end. They're very much of the mindset that installing a package now that makes their immediate job marginally easier, even if it means they have to come back to it in 3 months to update the dependency, is a worthwhile tradeoff (maybe it leads to more billable hours). So you don't get unassailable home run successes like Rails in the JS world. What you do get is a constant, diffuse process of tinkering and improvements, which is often underrated by HN type readers because we just want our code from 1/5/10 years ago to work without changes. In the macro I think the healthiest thing is to simply jump around on this spectrum on a regular basis to max out the rewards to learning at any given point.