Why is it that all these languages like PHP, but also typescript are becoming like impossible puzzles to read. I find these generics, types and other language features very often causing complex software architecture. I see so many collegues these days struggling in understanding codebases. You almost need a PHD brain to be a frontend web developer.

Like on of my sibling comment, I truly believe this is connected to some degree of social pressure.

People pointing fingers to "outdated" languages for not having some of the most trendy constructs.

The pipe operator is definitely one of the feature that create more ways to do the same thing while providing unclear benefit.

Never in my life I was in a situation like "with the pipe operator this I would have saved me hours of debugging/reading/creating code".

I assume it is some inferiority complex, on many sides. PHP itself was laughed at being too simple, underpowered and inconsistent, now they overcorrected with types, annotations and breaking backwards compatibility with every release so that no old code base can remain intact. Frontend devs yearned to be regarded as real developers, which in their context means construction of unwieldly and overcomplex enterprise bullshit, thus typescript etc. And in the backend you have that same mechanism, devs having to prove they are no beginners and thus using (wrongly) design patterns, instructed by software architects, instead of avoiding abstraction and thus complexity.

No, I'm not bitter.

It's somewhat comforting to read my insecurities shared by others in this thread