I have been a dev for 15 years. Its seems less fun now. I did hard core C++ games for 13 of that (Nintendo DS+Wii, 360 and PS3 games). You always had a pretty good sense of what what going on. Now I am doing web/mobile. Its just a messy swamp. Everyone's first instinct is to slap another JS library on every problem. The build breaks and I ask what does somebslib.js do? No one knows or cares. They just keep slapping more JS on the problem until it looks like it works. No desire to have a clear mental model. No desire for efficiency. Oh well. Working on personal projects is the only super fun coding I get to do.
I get what you're saying, but I don't think we should stop this movement of "plug and play" coding. Last year, I needed to build a really small app to be used internally by my company. Without "slapping another JS library" in, it would have taken me 6 months to build this application, but I did it in 2 weeks. It works, ~30 people use it every day, haven't run into any problems.
A critic would say, "but what about in ten years when they need to fix a problem with the app you built, but none of the libraries are around, or have all changed significantly, etc". To which I say, just build another one, the first one took me two weeks, just spend another two weeks building a newer one. Code is cheap, throw it away and get new code if the old stuff stops working.
This attitude bums me out so much... Especially when people act like they are "delegating responsibility," when they just don't want to think about one piece of the app anymore.
You can get so many huge productivity/efficiency gains simply by having a clear sense of the whole architecture. It doesn't even have to be one person with the whole thing in their head. Even just documenting out everything at a high level in a centralized place can add a lot of value.
This sounds like more of an issue acclimating to a dynamic language from C++. Some JavaScript developers don't use any libraries at all! Not the best solution either, but you have to remember how to be independent and constructive, even if your ecology is a "messy swamp." There is just as much demand for proficient writers of solid, efficient code on the web as anywhere else. Don't believe the hype.
In the JS world, there are a lot of crutches. jQuery used to be a crutch until the modern browser evolved; npm has 110,000 free crutches. But if you can walk, run, and stand up on your own, you shouldn't need crutches and shouldn't be bothered by others using them.
And there are scant few JavaScript libraries that let you choose what to take a la carte from them. The most extreme a la carte example I can think of is Lodash, which offers to let you pull each API function it offers as a separate CommonJS require! When you can go to those lengths, you show you care for your users and deservedly beat out the competition.
JavaScript libraries need to do this more. Sure, it is important to offer the uber dependency by default for users that don't care, but the a la carte form has to be available if users like me only want to take bits and pieces.
