The Frontend Treadmill

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Perceived Frontend Churn and Fragility

  • Many describe modern frontend as a treadmill: major tools and libraries feel “deprecated” every few years (Apollo CLI, React Router, ESLint configs, Webpack/Cra, etc.).
  • Upgrading “minor” versions often triggers breaking type changes, security scan failures, or entire build pipelines needing rework.
  • Compared to Rust, Go, Java, C#, etc., people report far more frequent breaking changes and rewrites in JS tooling.

Tooling, Package Managers, and Dependency Hell

  • Confusion over npm vs yarn vs pnpm vs bun; some see constant switching as self‑inflicted, others as forced by framework incompatibilities.
  • npm is generally viewed as “fine” but the NPM ecosystem (deep dependency trees, peerDependencies, semver‑justified breakage) is seen as the core pain point.
  • Complaints focus on resurrecting old stacks (Bower, Broccoli, older Angular/React setups) where figuring out historic package versions and Node/OS combos is detective work.

Cultural and Structural Causes

  • Several argue this is a cultural problem in the JS ecosystem: acceptance of churn, VC‑backed libraries chasing pivots, and bootcamp‑driven “npm install everything” habits.
  • Others tie it to UI being inherently hard and fast‑changing (browsers, design trends, complex state), similar to mobile UI churn (e.g., SwiftUI).
  • Influencer and course economies purportedly amplify hype cycles: frameworks as content funnels, not just technical choices.

Alternatives and Coping Strategies

  • Strong support for “boring” stacks: server-side rendering (Rails, Django, Phoenix), HTMX, LiveView, plain HTML/CSS/vanilla JS, minimal build steps.
  • Ember is praised as a rare example of long‑term, disciplined, upgradeable frontend with strict deprecation policies.
  • Advice: aggressively limit dependencies, avoid small peerDep-heavy packages, treat every library as “your code,” and pin versions.

Framework Stability: React and Others

  • Some say the “framework churn” narrative is outdated: React, Vue, Angular have all been around ~10 years.
  • Counterpoint: idiomatic React has changed substantially (class components → hooks, routing patterns, meta‑frameworks like Next/Remix), and surrounding tooling churn is what hurts.
  • Angular 1→2 is cited as a catastrophic break; Vue 2→3 and Svelte v5 runes are seen as painful but survivable.

Careers, Fundamentals, and LLMs

  • Many insist deep knowledge of core web tech (DOM, HTML, CSS, browser APIs) outlasts any framework; others note hiring still strongly favors “good at React.”
  • LLMs help some people offload frontend boilerplate, but others find models lag behind rapidly changing libraries and APIs.