I'll pick just one point to address:

> The JS tooling ecosystem is amazing and getting things setup nowadays just takes one command.

Which command would that be? Sure it's one command if you use one of a billion template projects, but just picking one of those is a chore and I'd never call that situation "amazing".

And god help you if you want to get anything to work just a little bit differently from how the "one command" chooses to set things up.

Like, create-react-app is great, but if you have to eject, you've got no parachute

Nowadays the only choice you’re really making is which styling library to use and which state management. Everything else is a given.

Anyways, if you know enough about FE to have an opinion on the tooling, great, choose what you want. If you don’t wanna choose, use Next.js or CRA with React/Styled-Components and then add React Router if you need routing and add state management if you need it.

These aren’t difficult choices to make. I have a feeling that the problem is that people are trying to make decisions they don’t need to be making up front.

Evaluate the choices when you reach a situation that requires it.

> Everything else is a given.

Would you please send a link that summarizes this "everything else"? Every time I take a look at JS ecosystem I get lost.

React, Webpack, Eslint, Jest, React Testing Library

That’s the standard setup nowadays and it’s what most people should go with. If you want type checking, add TS to the mix.

But seriously, just use Next.js you can build tiny static sites with it and you can build complex SPAs. It’s very lightweight and basically just strings together all these tools while adding some convention that you can follow if you wish.

I don’t understand this sort of criticism.

First, these generators are incredibly flexible. You can easily construct one command that fits your requirements. Understanding the correct options, your requirements for every part of the tool chain, and their occasionally predictable down-the-road implications takes quite some time, admittedly. However, all professional tools require knowledge and doc reading and experience with the latest bleeding-edge tools and experimentation and luck, I assume. Once you get a few years of experience under your belt working with this tool chain (not skipping the 3-4 hours per day after work to keep up with the latest JS ecosystem updates for this and the other new stacks you’ll need to learn throughout the week) you’ll be able to craft a command that requires very little reading or luck to use, and it could work, unmodified, for days, if not a week. If it turns out to not actually do what you want, you probably want the wrong thing— just ask on SO. But one-and-done, friend. Set it and forget it.

Second, this is all really easy if you just take the time to understand the tool chain. It’s just 4 or 19ish crucial, interdependent parts that all really should be in place from the very beginning and only most of them have inscrutable configuration schemas. Some are even documented! If you need more handholding than that, Sally, countless domain experts in countless online fora eagerly offer guidance like “go learn how X works first” or “lol that guide is weeks out of date— you have to use knippull.js instead of GROUNCE because GROUNCE was taken over by FlammBae last week and they’re just trying to sell add-ons for their data store and have ignored all PRs to support the latest version of SLAPPD which flibBleJs uses to transmogrify bNumbn{e}rs templates which you need for tr1xBits.js to work.” Once you understand how that all works, and understand how the generators implement those things, know how to compensate for the NBCF delta (Non-Backwards-Compatible Feature delta which calculates the number of implementation changes between typing the first character of your command and hitting enter,) theoretically your one-and-done is undeniably achievable.

Finally, people overstate the complexity of fixing a project started with the wrong boilerplate. Just experiment a bit. Spend a few days trying all the options to see which welcome pages don’t look broken in your browser (unless, of course, you’re using Waggle with FlermBox) and then narrow it down a bit based on that, and then just pick one. You can always fix it if it’s wrong. A literal child could understand the concept of “delete your project and start fresh” so I don’t think it should be hard to explain the concept to experienced software developers.

Developers used to paralyzingly straightforward legacy logic and organizational paradigms love to say that JS web dev tooling has the logical structure of a Wallace and Gromit short. They're completely ignoring the fact that this process was not designed— it evolved, and that’s okay. Not great, but okay.

Ultimately, it might look a little weird and insane and fragile if you peel back the onion skin to see how the sausage gets its secret sauce— but you too can achieve the pinnacle of modern developer push-button convenience with JS.

>Maybe 5-10 years ago, there is no need anymore

Is still either create your own or install a random package that brings other 20 as dependencies.

Example, you want to show an Alert or Yes/No popup, This are built-in everywhere but n Web world you need to review and install a third party thing, or create your own buggy or incomplete implementation.

Maybe you want modal dialogs, this is a standard in GUI tookits but you need to create your own or install a package/module/plugin specific for your project shitty framework

Maybe your designer demands a (context) menu one with keyboard shortucts and native looking like , or a scrollbar that matches the website/app theme colors or that works horizontally without holding Shift like in native apps, you have again to find 1 solution from a giant pile of shitty packages.

The dropdows,scrollbars, number spinner, color picker inputs CSS customization is pathetic, the designers demand customization and the only solution is installing third party stuff.

There is no DataGrid or ListView component with a smart implementation that can hold many items so all websites implement a crappy inefficient thing, or show you only 20 items and you need to hit NExt Page like a money or again you find a third party solution.

As a language JS progressed a lot, so much I am not sure if switching to TS is a good idea or I just need to wait until JS will catch up with TS. But as a platform the Web /DOM is still garbage, CSS got some nice feature with flexbox but that is all.

People that did not wrote complex desktop apps with a GUI framework will not understand this, and think that the shitty component they create by nesting 12 divs and catching 2 events is the exact same thing. It is not, this GUI frameworks components are efficient and handle all events/cases properly. Even Google devs were incapable to make the Youtube search suggestion dropdown work correctly, many times it gets stuck open and you can't close it without a reload.

This is a different discussion since Rails doesn't come with such an option either.

But I think you're hitting on two different, yet very related, issues here.

1. Browsers have a very limited set of standard UI components

2. Browsers are held back by the decades long, uninterrupted chain of backwards-compatibility

Both of these things are true. Back in the day, browsers forced more convention and design on elements (alert, select, input, list, textarea, etc), though developers weren't happy with the pace of innovation and design choices offered by the browsers so they began looking at alternative ways to implement the same thing. Eventually the browsers loosened up the restrictions and allowed styling of most of these elements in almost any way you like (though there still are issues).

The great thing about the web is that you are allowed to do this. You have the freedom to build things anyway you like. Of course, that comes with drawbacks like you've pointed out above. iOS is great because it provides a standard framework and approach to implement all of the things you outlined above. Though at the same time, you are limited to UX decisions that Apple deems "correct." I own an iPhone and Macbook and I wouldn't want it any other way at the OS-level.

But the web is the one platform we have where you don't have to abide by anyone's rules. The whole industry can iterate on approaches and the best ideas win. I like this world. I know it's not for everyone, but we don't have any other platform with such reach and freedom from any one company making the rules.

>The great thing about the web is that you are allowed to do this.

The truth is that for desktop(no idea about iOS or Android) I can also customize things as much as I want and I can do it faster and get better results. Desktop GUIs can give you pixel level access so you can have a button that plays a video inside it and rotates around while jump[ing and changing opacity.

About the Web I don't want to remove the option for everyone to invent their own menus if they want, I wish Mozilla,Google and Apple provide native options or as a stand alone library that you optionally include in your project.

For SPA this browser makers could colaborate to provide a standard framework, optional to use but would have all the basic features, bugs fixed and security updates, but it would be done by professional developers not as a side project by some Google dev with 0 experience in GUI toolkits.

> As a language JS progressed a lot, so much I am not sure if switching to TS is a good idea or I just need to wait until JS will catch up with TS.

Can you elaborate on this? TS is just adding type checking to JS, the only runtime addition are enums. I doubt that JS will incorporate type checking anytime soon.

I mostly agree with your other points.

I like to use class in JS to have types, some features are still missing in the major browsers like interfaces, some static stuff (I forgot), I miss the private and protected keywords , my IDE can show me errors for using the wrong types or even from JSDoc documentation but JS needs a standalone compiler/checker that will detect type errors at "compile" time.