We use Heroku instead of a custom AWS setup We use Sentry instead of a hand rolled exception tracking system We use Postgres instead of a custom
We are minimalist in the sense that we minimize the code we have to maintain in house.
It would be ideal if you could start with the tactic the article advocates and then easily switch from a stripped down custom approach to a more common denominator standard approach exactly when it begins to have better ROI. But in the real world, switching costs are high, ROI is impossible to measure perfectly, and there are other variables that matter a lot (like your future employees' familiarity with tools). My personal preference is in line with the article's suggestion - I strongly prefer building little purpose built things to reading documentation for and hacking around inconvenient parts of standard tools - but I tend to think it makes better business sense to go with the standard tools for things that aren't directly in your project's core competency.
Should one build their own database? Probably not. That introduces more complexity.
What about an npm package to pad strings? It's simpler to write that logic than to deal with one more dependency.
Giving two extreme examples to illustrate that "minimalism" may not be a useful criteria.
So seems like we're in agreement :)
Some of the transition from rolling your own to just using something else probably comes naturally from gaining sway over a project to the point that you can actually make the call to import a new package.
What pushed me back was the current JavaScript landscape, with endless breaking changes to the major UI frameworks and constant security vulnerabilities being reported in our code bases by GitHub (they're even doing auto pull requests now).
In my experience, updating any decently sized web app project is a huge pain, and very time consuming. Everything is constantly moving. Libraries, frameworks, build tools, node, etc etc. These are all dependencies.
There is extremely bloated software that can be replaced by a few lines of code but, in general, minimalism is hard to get right and requires a high level of expertise.
Now? I see things differently. I look at the problem and evaluate existing solutions. 90% of the time, there's a battle-tested open-source (or cheap) solution which fits our requirements that I can quickly integrate without burning piles of company cash building and supporting my custom crap. Yes, it's not minimalist. But it's overwhelmingly a better decision most of the time.
(Mind, I suspect one's experience is highly dependent on the developer ecosystem one is in. Just my 2c.)