The web is not an application platform, it’s a document rendering platform that has been hacked together to be an application platform.

Without libraries it’s incredibly hard to be productive building applications. It’s only with dependencies that the web becomes an acceptable application platform.

Look at how much JS it takes to implement a material-ui textfield that automatically grows and shrinks. Building a date picker is a pain in the ass. Making sure those things follow all the arcane aria standards to be accessible is difficult. There’s no good reason why everyone should have to rebuild their own date picker.

Without libraries the web is the hardest application platform to use by far if you are trying to build actual apps and not just websites with content.

> Look at how much JS it takes to implement a material-ui textfield that automatically grows and shrinks.

I would do that with CSS.

> Building a date picker is a pain in the ass. Making sure those things follow all the arcane aria standards to be accessible is difficult.

If you want to display a visual calendar then yes, mostly. However, if instead you make date picking relative to now then it becomes very simple. It’s just adding or subtracting numbers from Date.now(). You can even produce date spans super easily.

I understand where you are going. When everything starts from a visual UI perspective the code is just an implementation detail except that it’s dense. If instead you start at from the implementation perspective of how it really works at the lowest level then everything just appears step by step. Nobody starts building beautiful skyscrapers from the visual exterior first. No, they lay the foundation, a boring slab of concrete around some grounding poles.