We're now firmly in the age of complexity and thousands of new tools and projects - it's important that people provide a very simple introduction/overview to 'what something is'.
That said, I agree, it's not hugely helpful to have all our discussion be about that.
Is it really useless though? I wish the front end community tried to make existing things better instead of reinventing the wheel every year and causing immense fragmentation, especially for something like the build toolchain.
What annoys me about this discourse is that anybody in the front end world knows this is an issue. People aren’t contributing anything by complaining about it.
All this grunt->gulp->webpack->vite->'the inevitable replacement for vite' are really achieving is finding slightly different ways of doing the same thing.
"all this python->go are really achieving is finding slightly different ways of doing the same thing"
"all this relational db->document stores are really achieving is finding slightly different ways of doing the same thing"
This is simply a false statement. Chrome increases its dominance every year, which actually makes it a lot easier to write frontend code, but that isn't necessarily "better".
In other areas:
- Typescript has been a huge boon to the ecosystem and is widely adopted
- Babel is the standard for transpiling code and has allowed for all these compile-to-JS projects to exist
- ESBuild/SWC exist if you want to do things faster and less flexibly, but they're still a minor part of the ecosystem