It would be progress if the library based approach were a 1-to-1 replacement for the code a DIY programmer would have written, but that's never the case.
The new library solves maybe 95% of the problem, but then you find that the 5% they don't solve is critical to your project. So then you have to rip it out and start again, or bolt your own solution on top, or add yet another library etc etc etc.
Worse that the needed things the libraries don't do are the unneeded things they do. For example, you often find security problems from using third party components which are bigger than needed and so have a relatively huge attack surface.
Finally, you end up in dependency hell, especially if one of the libraries depends on another which depends on another... and especially if there are incompatibilities between different versions of the library. You can end up with multiple versions of a library, and heaven help you if you connect to the wrong one.
In conclusion, if you are a developer on one of these "Lego"
projects, you end up responsible for very many features, but with understanding and control of very few. This is a very unfair working environment and means that you will spend the rest of your life debugging rather than developing.
It would be progress if the library based approach were a 1-to-1 replacement for the code a DIY programmer would have written, but that's never the case.
The new library solves maybe 95% of the problem, but then you find that the 5% they don't solve is critical to your project. So then you have to rip it out and start again, or bolt your own solution on top, or add yet another library etc etc etc.
Worse that the needed things the libraries don't do are the unneeded things they do. For example, you often find security problems from using third party components which are bigger than needed and so have a relatively huge attack surface.
Finally, you end up in dependency hell, especially if one of the libraries depends on another which depends on another... and especially if there are incompatibilities between different versions of the library. You can end up with multiple versions of a library, and heaven help you if you connect to the wrong one.
In conclusion, if you are a developer on one of these "Lego" projects, you end up responsible for very many features, but with understanding and control of very few. This is a very unfair working environment and means that you will spend the rest of your life debugging rather than developing.