The web used to be so much more DIY. Everyone used jQuery but it wasn't prescriptive, it was just a holistic tool (to use Ursala Franklin's framing) to enable us to do whatever. There weren't established practices, there weren't big toolkits/frameworks/libraries under-feet.

The maturation & industrialization of development means that developers no longer are puzzling out the world from first principles. We aren't evaluating each library that comes along to figure out how it might fit into our bespoke apps.

> You become a Next.js developer, a React developer, a Rust developer etc

React in particular is such a distinction of development. It is it's own Terra Firma, solid ground, upon which developers stand, only barely coupled to the underlying platform. Knowing the web itself is still enormously good and helpful, but there is such a huge engine at your back, doing so much work, that is extremely hard to take as more than a black box. Even if you know the web very well, there is still a huge opaque engine between the code you write and the web actual that's targetted.

We don't have the raw experience anymore to be broader developers. Vs React, I think it's more ok to consider oneself a Rust developer, where one is still quite close to the metal, where the only focus-narrowing is to a general purpose language that's good for anything (especially with Rust being such a fore-runner at WebAssembly!).

It seems like big companies are doing some great things with WebComponents, but there's still so little broader attention, and little cultural energy for them. The lack is cyclical: there's scant developer culture around webcomponents, and so scant webcomponent acceptance & knowledge. It feels like such an opportunity for shared knowledge, for excitement, for figuring things out & making patterns, for a more grounded closer to the firm earth potential, and one that obviously needs the curiosity and excitement. But it's React Uber Alles, React on and on.