Honestly. Where I work we have a few undergrad co-op students who have just finished their first year of school. No previous React experience. They jumped right in and were useful on our React projects after about week. They just read some docs, asked a couple questions and played with our existing code. They're smart people but they're not x10 programmers.
We have other large projects that are a more "traditional" mix of DOM manipulation use jQuery, global CSS, etc. and introducing new hires to that is never as smooth. There are no docs as thorough as React's that explain the patterns established in those codebases (if there are any consistent patterns at all).
One thing to note, we make what I would consider to be web applications (for data management & analysis), not web pages.
I also don’t get the JS hate here. :) you certainly should not use react for your static resume site or blog. But react is a brilliant and necessary tool for web applications. If you don’t use it, you’ll end up making your own, probably worse abstraction for managing state and reactive updates.
The problem with many layers of abstraction is that it borders the imposible if the layer abstacted to poorly suports something.
Take physical screen size and simple scaling to fit? Is it a tiny 1024px laptop or a giant tv? there is no solution I can think of
You can't honestly compare VB UI's to modern day web UI with a straight face. Following your analogy, making decent UIs is closer to rocket science because web apps are closer to rockets than bicycles these days.
I would love to see a drag-n-drop approach to web UI building that is responsive and fast. But I highly suspect the reason this doesn't exist isn't "great job security".
There's really nothing complex or difficult enough in React, Vue, or any other UI framework that can't be picked up by a competent dev quickly.
>Something is wrong
Yeah, the hivemind that loves to hate anything JS/front-end related and things "purity" is the only bar by which to measure things.