Modern Web Development is Weird

As a developer these days it's important to move with the times. In our day jobs here at DP towers, we uses all sorts of different technologies and aim to find the best fit for our clients projects - some use "traditional" server based languages like PHP (both with and without it's associated frameworks like Laravel, CodeIgniter and friends). We build and integrate with REST APIs, GraphQL, MariaDB, MongoDB and whatever "the next big thing" ends up turning out to be.

However, I can't help but feel a little like our industry is hell bent on using "the next big thing" without and real consideration of it's suitability for a solving a particular problem. I think this applies, in spades, within the front end development space.

In the good (bad) old days, we had a server side language like PHP, RoR, Python etc (does anyone remember ColdFusion!? that one really is a blast from the past) which was used for rendering dynamically generated HTML content and shipping that to the browser. On the frontend we had Javascript which, believe it or not, we were discouraged from using for any key areas of functionality, largely due to browser support