In the two last projects I have worked on I have been lucky to work with great younger developers that neither invent things from scratch nor insist on pulling in exotic dependencies.

We have used mainstream technologies like just Quarkus or Spring Boot and plain React with Typescript and the absolute bare minimum of dependencies.

I have worked with a number of good devs over the years but it is amazing how productive these teams have been. (Should probably also mention that we were also lucky to have great non technical people on those teams.)