I thought about other title that could fit better "how meta frameworks killed frontend development", but decided to stick with this more "clickbait" title :D Nevertheless, what do I mean? That JS is so easy that AI will write everything now? No, I'm not even talking about AI. It's more about the broad spectrum of frontend development nowdays. How would you define frontend developer? A person from UI? It used to be that, but later Next.js, Remix and others came and moved the line once again. And of course companies are happy with this change, because nowdays they can again get back to "webmasters". Only now we have new name for it - Fullstack developer. What the hell does it even means? In majority of cases, a person who will take care about whole application. Database, backend, frontend, security, QA, UX, UI and DevOps. Very convenient for companies. Now they can demand from you anything, because you are fullstack dev, you should know this! And I really love this meme which says
Dear recruiter, if you are looking for a specialist in Next.js, Postgress, AWS, Docker, Cubernetes, Node.js ... (etc.) then you are looking for an entire IT department, not one person.
Now in web env you can upload firmware to/communicate directly with IoT devices, create AR/VR application, make 3D visualizations, build almost native apps using PWA, run neural network or even LLMs in browser, do heavy computations using WebGPU or/and WebAssembly, and of course create web apps. And for most companies all of this falls into definition of frontend developer (or fullstack, so add also backend technologies mentioned before).
One more thing before final roast - have you complained recently about the quality (or rather lack thereof) of any software? Tragic UI created on the fly, bad UX etc? Yeah, I think we are here. Mastering somethig takes time. For me to be comfortable with creating convenient interfaces, to be able to say “ok, here we do this, and there we have to do that, because it will be convenient for the user” took about 10 years. Today we want a programmer to embrace all these technologies and be great at them. We are going back again to the situation 15 years ago, where the webmaster simply had to embrace the website. But also the technologies were simpler then and didn't have so many complexities, today I sympathize with anyone who enters this world, because I for the last decade have developed a certain feel for it and it may be easier for me to embrace certain technologies, but when I see lost juniors in my work it makes me sad.
I haven't yet mentioned AI, of course, which is being pushed today as the solution to all complexity and companies are still trying to create this artificial pressure on their own employees that if they don't use AI they are inefficient. I even had an example of this with one of my friends recently, his manager came and told them to find some use for AI because management says they are inefficient if they don't use it. So we have come to the point where one is looking for applications by force, without any consideration. I feel that efficiency has become the new deity of our world, if you object to someone inserting the word “efficiency” into their statement it's like telling the Spanish Inquisition that the god doesn't exist. But that's probably a discussion for a separate article, so let's end this digression here.
In concluding this text, I would like to appeal for restraint, because the situation is sick. We are increasing the complexity more and more and, in the process, companies are reducing the workforce, increasing the workload of the rest. I think that neither the (in my opinion dubious) hype for meta frameworks nor pushing AI as a solution to every problem helps here. I also send a virtual hug to anyone who feels aggrieved by this situation, I really don't think this is normal and I think it should be openly discussed.