I don’t agree that short is always better. Sometimes it’s better to write the code so that it’s easier to understand than to use smart tricks to make it short, because the next person looking at the code might not be on to your tricks. You can argue both ways on this of course, but I prefer clean and easily understandable because I’ve seen what happens when you don’t do that and a junior programmer has to fix something 15 years later.
I also disagree that libraries are better. You seem wary of JS, and that’s good, but no libraries are magical and none of them can be trusted to do something for you, unless you look under the hood.
Especially not open source libraries. If you don’t know what is going on inside the libraries you use, then you’re heading for a world of pain. Of course some libraries are better than others, but using them blindly is wrong. And if you have to read up on them, then they aren’t really quick fixes.
We had a developer who used a library to handle decimals. We have our own library for this, that we’ve build because almost none of the open source libraries for decimals are very good at handling memory allocation and floats and computers aren’t 0.00000000000 they are 0.00000001436 etc. But our developer didn’t know we had our own library for this, so he used a public one. One that uses around 10 other libraries, one of which didn’t handle memory allocation the way you’d want.
So suddenly our decimals were wrong, but the computer didn’t know they were wrong, because technically the library worked it just wasn’t specific enough. And it cost us a lot of money to clean things up afterwards.
This is the extreme example, but it’s never been more relevant than it is today. Especially not in a world where less and less programmers seem to actually know how computers or even compilers work.