Yeoman felt a little too much like a vehicle for one class of developers to foist architectural ideas on people. I'm glad it lost momentum. It would have accelerated the frontend tech churn if it took hold, not simplify or slow it down. It was also clunky to use, and created a situation where 2 or 3 people would compete to vend the canonical Yeoman config for a new frontend technology.

In a way, it's been superseded by create-react-app and it's ilk, but I think those kind of tools are fine. If you're reaching for a tool like create-*-app, then you've already made a specific choice about a number of things, and it's just helping you to bootstrap the project.

It going to happen again soon with WASM. But I'm welcoming that. We'll probably all end up writing full stack Ruby, or something.

I know it has been attempted many times. But like the general problem of too many options, it doesn't gain enough attention and develop a critical mass.

And in the case of setup tools, they tend to all suffer from the problem of being very difficult to change once setup. The tool you use to build the customized foundation is often unable to make future modifications if you have changed any of the generated code.

But by now we know the 99% common options people want: a choice of a few databases, (probably but optional) user profiles and auth, etc. The database side is pretty much solved, but the user management is definitely not - and it's the source of so many data leaks.