The Frontend Treadmill - These Yaks Ain’t Gonna Shave Themselves
polotek.net/posts/the-frontend-treadmill
What Jamie wrote
Technology moves and evolves quickly, but there is probably no part of technology that changes as much as frontend frameworks for web applications. If you go on a long vacation you might find everything has changed. The downsides of this are real. Product teams spend a lot of time moving from one to another.
If your product is still around in 5 years, you're doing great and you should feel successful. But guess what? Whatever framework you choose will be obsolete in 5 years. That's just how the frontend community has been operating, and I don't expect it to change soon. Even the popular frameworks that are still around are completely different. Because change is the name of the game. So they're gonna rewrite their shit too and just give it a new version number.
Product teams that are smart are getting off the treadmill. Whatever framework you currently have, start investing in getting to know it deeply. Learn the tools until they are not an impediment to your progress. That's the only option. Replacing it with a shiny new tool is a trap.
I've had my own teams spend a lot of time migrating from X to Y. There is always a good reason to make these changes. They improve something. But you also know you’re never really done.
The article makes a good point that the learnings here are too abstracted up the stack. As a developer it encourages that you work closer to the browser itself. Use less abstraction. I guess that means you would also own more of the stack? That is also a tough tradeoff.
As a CTO, I might actually just pick the middle. Use a simple framework. Knowingly plan to use it well past its market "cool factor" is over. Five or six years. Wait until the product needs evolve to the point where you need to reconsider the front end experience, and use that change event to jump forward. Some attempt to thread the needle on not reinventing all the time, but also not building a ton of abstract framework code that slows you down.
But then a security issue will pop up and call your bluff. 🤦♂️