> I think that's why people will, like the author, ultimately drop out. When writing code for a living turns into this obligatory, rote exercise of juggling this mass of dependencies and complexity, with little to no time or authority to question why they need all this in the first place.

This is why I'm optimistic that some small companies or startups will look at this black box, go "nope" and look at simpler alternatives : maybe hotwire or htmx, or some other tech or architecture allows them to build the things they need to build quickly and efficiently and outpace their complexity-bound competition - much like Rails was the alternative back in 2004 to the J2EE behemoths of the day that the industry considered the "right" way to build a web app.