It seems like every month there's a new fron-end trend that needs to be experimented with and learned. It gets a little daunting at times (hard to find the time, really) so I'm glad effort is being put in to lists like yours. I think it would be invaluable to a beginner.
I don't know about that. With Github you profess that experience with git is necessary to take advantage of "the rich open-source community that has arisen around front-end development technologies" – but that's not true. Explain how downloading the repo as a zip is slower or less advantageous than opening Terminal and typing commands – while I'm already looking at the Github project page in the browser? How would a purely front-end developer tell the difference?
> At the very least, you should be aware of tools like UglifyJS or Closure Compiler that will intelligently minify your code, and then concatenate those minified files prior to production.
In what world? This grates on me because it looks to be little more than grandstanding. And I hate grandstanding. What if you're coding with RoR or any other language with a sophisticated asset pipeline? Ugh.
50% of the techniques/tools you mentioned could be replaced or removed entirely without much issue in any front-end developer position I've encountered – in fact, this rigid brick layering of relative experience may even be looked upon as negative to an employer as it's clear that you are unwavering.
> that I wish someone had done for me in the past.
I think it's great for you to catalog and share, but to declare your list as the defacto baseline is ridiculous and presumptuous.
> Good front-end devs know to prefix any search engine query with mdn
Yeah, not an ego-derived rant at all.
I could interject all sorts of other expertise that I must use on a daily basis, where my lack of knowledge of such would render me unemployed. My skill set has evolved into what someone might call a designineer. Do I think everyone has to be a hybrid designer/developer to get the job done? Of course not. However, I wouldn't gather those skills and conflate that my skill set is necessary to getting the job done for someone else.
It reminds me of the purist argument, where the evangelist will protest against web fonts, frameworks and the like. In 2001, if you were using CSS or JS you were not a purist. We can see that labels like these are to serve a purpose and it seems to be little more than an exercise in pedantry.
At the end of the day, it's about providing quality work and getting the respect you deserve for your work.