> because we have to legitimately market ourselves and our work somehow.

Do we ?

You don't. But I did and now get paid 3 times more than I did before. There aren't enough high paying bay area jobs to go around for all developers in the world, so as they say, early bird gets the worm.

If we went to be "better than average" then yes. You must do something to stick out in order to get better jobs, more money, more fame, more power, etc.

> People then post their work because we have to legitimately market ourselves and our work somehow.

Wouldn't it be better if we experimented with radical new ideas for development instead of reinventing the same JavaScript wheel for 300th time?

We are though. One of the current shift that is happening is that frameworks are moving away from using Webpack and so on during development. Vue now has Vite, Svelte is moving to Snowpack, etc. This can speed up development iteration time by orders of magnitudes.

I agree that that would be swell but sometimes you have to practice the same movements as those that came before to learn something new?

Svelte did this by throwing away virtual DOMs and using a compiler to directly bind elements to data.