Your comment comes across like someone who has read a lot of HN comments, mixed it with an anecdote or two heard from friends at a bar, and is trying to pass it off as industry experience. And yeah, if you believe HN comments, then everyone is making six figures (but somehow also contribute no value), things like docker are easy to learn and require no skill (because folks here learned them easily after having years of software development experience) and npm users pull in packages for string operations (something that was true years ago, is still occasionally true in open source, but is not true in most shops I’ve worked in).
Believe it or not, my current client does code reviews, mandates 85% unit test coverage, and tests in all the major browsers. And if anything doesn’t pass muster, even small visual defects, it gets kicked back and is not merged. When I talk to the people I meet at JS meetups, their workplaces are not all the same, but they’re usually similar.
It really doesn't take much in this technology space to be a 10x (or much more) developer. It really boils down to don't do stupid things and don't wait for dependencies to do your job for you.
I have seen first hand at multiple places that web dev is extremely fashion driven and half-assed code are passed off as industry best practice.
Moreover even without knowing the internals at workplaces, I can see typical websites are slow, buggy, crappy so even if best code, it does not mean much to me as a user.
> If I smell this attitude on someone, I’m not hiring them.
I don't think you have worked with the web in a professional capacity. Greater than 90% of the people doing this work now have no idea where the nuts and bolts actually go. They know they cannot do their jobs without some sort of framework to do most of it for them. They also know they need half a million NPM packages to left pad 3 lines of text and writing the equivalent functionality themselves is emotional torture (its like child abuse, except these are adults).
While this attitude comes across as code smell it is the industry norm. The unfortunate conclusion there is that it makes life substantially harder for people who are experienced and prefer to not operate in ways you might refer to as code smell.