Appreciate the lengthy response, but I want to clarify a few things since I think my original point keeps getting mischaracterized.

First, the italics. You opened with “This is a very bizarre take”—emphasis on very—which, whether you intended it or not, sets a smug tone. It’s the kind of rhetorical move that shuts down discussion before it starts. I’m not saying this to nitpick style, but to point out how quickly this moved from a discussion about tooling to a dismissal of my viewpoint. It is an easy tell the person writing gives away when they use it like you do.

Now, to the substance: yes, the D3 API is technically independent of Observable. But in practice, Observable is now the primary medium through which new users encounter and learn D3. The official examples, new documentation, and most teaching material are embedded in the Observable environment, which introduces its own model of reactivity, syntax, and execution. That’s not a minor detail, it’s a real obstacle for people who just want to understand and use D3 in plain JavaScript.

Your PyTorch/mkdocs analogy completely misses the mark. Mkdocs is a static site generator. It doesn’t change the code you’re learning—Observable, on the other hand, does. You can’t meaningfully learn D3 from many of these new examples without understanding how Observable cells work. That’s a tight coupling, and one I don’t think should be hand-waved away.

“Just use AI to convert the notebook” is a non-answer. It assumes everyone is okay with outsourcing understanding to a black box just to get a usable snippet. That’s exactly the kind of indirection I’m objecting to in the first place.

Lastly, yes, I’ve set a personal boundary: I don’t want to buy into an ecosystem that made a choice I don’t support. That’s not a call to boycott, it’s just me saying, this direction doesn’t work for me. If that’s enough to dismiss my view as bizarre, then I’m not sure what kind of discussion is even possible here.

Entirely unrelated, but I've not heard anyone describe it as `outsourcing understanding` until now. That's a great phrase.