> There is a real art to knowing which is which.

Absolutely, but that “art” is really important, and also, fairly rare.

Many folks just jam in any dependency that is a first hit in a search, with more than 50 GH stars, and a shiny Web site.

One “red flag” phrase that I’ve learned is “That’s a solved problem!”. When I hear that, I know I should be skeptical of the prescribed “solution.”

That said, there’s stuff that definitely should be delegated to better-qualified folks. One example, that I was just working on[0], is Webauthn stuff.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/addendum-a-server-setup/