Thanks. Sometimes I feel very old and lonely when I complain about overuse of components, in any situation. But for me, it is the way so many people today just seem to use npm to pull in millions of dependencies, that themselves pull in millions of dependencies, ending up with ridiculous amount of data having to be downloaded and ridiculous amounts of code being executed, for what may be just to compile a "hello world" app. I'm actually very frugal on the back-end side also: the Go API server for pushdata only uses a handful external packages (like Stripe's Go SDK, a GetOpt package, Gorilla/mux - a URL router, A PostgreSQL connector and an AWS package for talking to AWS SES)
I think a lot of it stems from bootcamps and whatnot, focusing on letting people check off a number of boxes by the end of the course/system/whatever.
Node - Check
React - Check
Angular - Check
NPM - Check
"See how much you've learned in just two weeks! You'll easily get a job with that!"
And so on.
Rather than learning how some of this stuff actually works, many new developers are falsely led down a path where they think they can't create cool useful stuff without relying on a massive number of libraries and build processes.
See the whole leftpad disaster for example (Yes, I know, they fixed it, but it happened to begin with).
No seasoned or even moderately experienced developer should be using a package for something as simple as padding something. If I saw leftpad during a code review I'd send it back to the dev to fix.
Right now I'm creating a website using pretty basic tools, no frontend builds, and a backend using FPC, Postgresql for DB and done, no mass of libraries, no cascade of dependencies.. Just good performance, simple builds (Single FPC compile to executable), and easy for anyone to wrap their head around the entire process.
It makes perfect sense for the bootcamps to exist to fill that niche, it's just horribly unfortunate for both the companies hiring people with less skill than they think, and the new developers being led down bad paths.
Another part of the problem is that job ads only show part of the image.
If you can show that you're a good developer with a solid track record, those HR checklists largely become null and void.
Just look at how many job ads include "Must have Bachelors in CS", which most of us know is complete bull.
I'm amazed sometimes of how complicated and heavy some people, especially new developers, make things.
While I usually pull in JQuery for small applications, sometimes all you need is.. well, nothing, just the core language(s).