I feel like there is variation on a Santayana quote I (think I) once read here:

The world will never know what software monstrosities have been perpetrated for fear of appearing insufficiently smart.

well said. Backbone has suited me very well over the past 3 years, and now React. i have a hard time understanding what necessitates all these patterns in the first place and how i've been able to write web applications without them.

It's when Angular has to play with something else, some other library or plugin. And the more Angular Modules you outsource, the hope is that you're all using Directives and Promises rigorously. It gives templates a lot more say in terms of complexity.

Some days my vim looks like (mostly Directives):

    ----------------------------
    |    |    |    |     |     |
    |    |    |    |-----------|
    |    |    |    |     |     |
    |    |    |    |-----------|
    |    |    |    |     |     |
    ----------------------------
    

And I'm thinking: Oh god what's happening, is this the abyss?