I read the anxiety as far less being about popularity than past trauma from the Javascript ecosystem and the whiplash it went through before it settled on the React/Vue/Typescript world we have today. When you go through that much change in the past, you really need a good argument to be convinced to try something new.

As a developer, I haven't had any qualms with ESLint, so I wouldn't really have any reason to pick up Rome. Now if the full tool set offers lots of things, then I might consider replacing my current Vue template / create-react-app, but that's a big step.

All of this to say, no, it's not an appeal to authority. It's sounds like a "I'm not sure I can imagine this being worth switching to because we have something that works and is stable now, and we haven't had a great track record with tooling churn in JS world". It's a value add question.

> from the Javascript ecosystem

If that's really the problem you have to perform an honest self-assessment: are you spending more time and energy on tooling and framework drama than building/maintaing original products?

Its an important question to ask yourself as it directly indicates whether you are delivering or consuming business value. Developers will twist themselves into knots to falsely correlate those two things, but customers and end users absolutely don't care.

As much as this sentiment rings true, it's also a fairly useless one

Most people don't have jobs building/maintaining original products or delivering or consuming business value. Most people have jobs doing what someone else tells them. Business value just happens to be the byproduct of doing what is told. When this "someone else" finds this brand new tool, either they ignore it in favor of existing tooling which means you're never going to learn it which means you're left behind in a constantly changing ecosystem and then changing jobs becomes a massive pain because you're not familiar with said tool, or "someone else" loves it and you're forced to adopt it and your life is pain as you migrate ancient projects to try and please their whims

JS being in such constant flux means new companies making new products adopt the standards set by the current trends which means they will not hire you if your knowledge has gaps and if you're looking for new careers, you have to continually keep up. This is exhausting and a lot of people are, IMO rightfully so, frustrated

Shifting ground from value add to required wasted time as ordered by leadership is an odd position.

It’s that kind of nonsense that incompetent people use to qualify prior bad decisions formed from insecurity at expense to everything else. It’s less clever than a person might think.

You just repeated what I said, yeah? My whole point is not trying Rome is focusing on exactly that. Feels like we're going in circles here. The top level post you commented on is performing that exact assessment you just asked for and criticized as an appeal to popularity.

Yep, that's exactly where I was coming from. Thanks.