People talk about the 'good old days' of jquery. I do think it was easier to be a web developer in those days because there weren't as many levels of abstraction. It was just your simple text editor, html and js script, that's it. And you were directly changing the DOM. But writing jQuery for complicated apps can get out of control very fast. I do not miss querying classes on an element to figure out what to do next. Nowadays I meet 'React Developers' who didn't know that you can do document.querySelector(...). They tell me without batting an eye that React makes websites faster.. and that it is faster than plain javascript. And before anyone tells me that it can make things faster through DOM diffing or what have you -- you are wrong. Situationally React could be faster than poorly written js, but in most cases it won't be and that is not its point. It doesn't magically imbue your web application with hyper speed. Quite the opposite! Its like all these layers of node, npm, React, Hooks crud built up and there are actually people junior enough that their only exposure to webdev is through this morass -- and that is sad. Not because these tools/frameworks are bad, but because web dev can be so simple and easy and they are robbed of having that in their back pocket, as a proper foundation.